Biology Library News

Update on FRPAA

Two links for news and background:
FRPAA in the Spotlight: Public Access Bill featured in Congressional Briefing, Two Dozen Bipartisan Co-sponsors add their Support
The Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA)

WUSTL Open Scholarship Repository

Washington University Libraries introduce Open Scholarship repository I hope to have more information about submitting materials soon. Meanwhile WUSTL dissertations and theses 2009+ and some student papers, including selected Biology senior honors theses from 2011 are included in openscholarship.wustl.edu.

Recommended reading

An extraordinary week. This blog post by Kevin Smith, J.D from Scholarly communications @ Duke is another nice summary of Elsevier and public access legislation stories. See also my post.

The Elsevier Boycott and its relationship to WUSM Although written from WU School of Medicine perspective, the "Facts and Figures about Elsevier's Impact at Becker Library" is useful in describing pros and cons of the current WU no-cancellations contract with Elsevier and the situation that many Elsevier journals, especially the Cell Press titles, are still heavily used and prime locations for many biologists.. Even given the "pros" I can't imagine that the Danforth campus will continue this contract much longer. We'll see.

Is the pot calling the kettle black? This blog post, by Stuart Shieber in The Occasional Pamphlet on scholarly communication, compares rising tuition/cost of attendance prices with rising journals prices (he calls this hyperinflation of journal prices). His price information is from what Harvard University pays. I think he makes a good case that what has been going on with institutional subscription prices in recent years is really something extraordinary.

The OA Interviews: Michael Eisen, co-founder of the Public Library of Science . The full recent interview with Richard Poynder is 19 pages long but worth browsing for a good look at the opinions of this biologist and open access advocate.

Elsevier Boycott, public access legislation and anti-public access legislation

The Cost of Knowledge, boycott Elsevier, petition has more than 7,000 signatures so far, including our own Joan Strassmann. This site was started by the math community in response to Tim Gowers's blog post Elsevier — my part in its downfall, Jan. 21, 2012. Response has been widespread and thoughtful regarding the role of publishers and how scholarly publishing might develop in the future. Undoubtedly this response to the boycott is the direct cause of Elsevier's response Feb. 27th: Elsevier Withdraws Support for the RWA. [Also I started seeing stories on Feb. 27th that RWA legislation is dead.] I find myself a bit skeptical about all this proposed legislation, such as Research Works Act RWA and Federal Research Public Access Act FRPAA. I doubt that either RWA or FRPAA will pass this year, but I do find all the discussion interesting. I can't begin to list all the discussions generated recently. Selected links:
Journal Publishing Reform site on the PolyMath wiki brings together a lot of links
Michael Eisen: You are Elsevier: time to overcome our fears and kill subscription journals
11 Research University Provosts in Inside Higher Education: Values and Scholarship
Heather Joseph from SPARC: Prime Time for Public Access
The Alliance for Taxpayer Access is currently maintaining a Comprehensive list of FRPAA & RWA in the news.
I will continue to follow these stories and would love to discuss your reactions and concerns. I welcome comments and emails on these and related subjects.

Interesting reading for researchers

This article, just published in Nature Genetics, outlines a common standard for data tagging currently in use in several diverse databases: Toward interoperable bioscience data Nature Genetics 44:121–126 (2012) doi:10.1038/ng.1054 Published online 27 January 2012. "Although ongoing activities hold promise, they are a drop in the ocean compared to the daunting challenges ahead: for example, the integration of clinical and biological data in translational medicine and the establishment of mechanisms to support credit for data sharing, which would benefit data producers for making their data accessible." More info on the ISI metadata tracking framework. News story: Researchers agree on standard for data sharing across the world.

The science of better science, by Gregory Goth. Communications of the ACM 55(2):13-15, Feb. 2012. This article talks a bit about some uses for VIVO, which is a system that has been implemented for WU medical faculty, but not yet all of WU. "Researchers are exploring networked computational analysis, formal classification, and topic modeling to better identify relevant scientists, ideas, and trends."

For fun you may be interested in these videos: Doodling in Math Class: Spirals, Fibonacci, and Being a Plant

WUSTL Authors' Discounts on Open Access Author Processing Fees

We have recently updated Subsidized Open Access Fees for WU and WUSM Authors. New in 2012: WUSTL has purchased Hindawi and PLoS institutional memberships which allow WU authors discounts on those article processing fees.

Open access publishing / open research data links

I've been reading a lot about open access publishing and open research data recently. This has been easy to do because there is so much being said, probably due to the Berlin 9 Conference on Open Access Conference held earlier this month and the two White House Requests for Information (RFI) which many individuals and organizations are thinking about responding to asap. Many of your professional organizations, favorite publishers, and colleagues will be submitting responses before January 2nd! I encourage you to consider responding individually or letting your organizations know your ideas on these issues.
    - One RFI is about recommendations on approaches for broad public access and long-term stewardship to peer-reviewed scholarly publications that result from federally funded scientific research. This Alliance for Taxpayer Access summary page is a good summary and links to the original RFI information.
    - The other RFI offers the opportunity for interested individuals and organizations to provide recommendations on approaches for ensuring long-term stewardship and encouraging broad public access to unclassified digital data that result from federally funded scientific research. This is the information from the Federal Register about the digital data RFI.
Here are a few other links which you may find interesting:
    - The Unexpected Reader - blog post by Kevin Smith from Duke University gives another reason to consider open access publishing when you can
    - I'm currently reading Reinventing discovery : the new era of networked science / Michael Nielsen. I'm finding this quite interesting. You may want to put it on your "to-read" list. Here is a book review from THE GUARDIAN, an interview with the author, Michael Nielsen and Michael Nielsen's blog.
    - The first-ever peer-reviewed paper derived directly from a biodiversity metadata document has been published in the open-access ZooKeys journal. More info | the paper: Literature based species occurrence data of birds of northeast India.
    - Another interesting ZooKeys article for all researchers trying to figure out how to manage their data: Creative Commons licenses and the non-commercial condition: Implications for the re-use of biodiversity information. A blog post about this article by Peter Murray-Rust: Scientists should NEVER use CC-NC. This explains why
    - Impact has a bad name among many researchers, but thinking of impact as re-use could be key to uniting both funders and researchers, blog post by biophysicist Cameron Neylon.

Open Access at Washington University

New library guide: Open Access at Washington University

Upcoming events: Open Access @ Washington University: Why Here? Why Now? Why Care? The University Libraries invites you to this session to get the facts about the Open Access Resolution adopted by the WU Faculty Senate and what it means to your rights as an author. This is especially relevant to faculty but other scholarly authors or prospective authors may be interested also. Bring your questions! Thurs., October 27, Noon-1, Danforth University Center room 276. REFRESHMENTS WILL BE PROVIDED. For more information, contact Ruth Lewis rlewis@wustl.edu Preregistration requested
A similar session will be held at the medical campus (Holden Auditorium, Farrell Learning and Teaching Center), Tuesday, October 25 at noon, in case that fits your schedule better. More information about the Medical Campus session

New York Times September 18, 2011: Internet Ruffles Pricey Scholarly Journals, by D.D. Guttenplan. "Open access is now an established part of the publishing landscape,” said Mr. Patterson of PLoS, “but there is still a long way to go before it becomes the dominant model."

How to cite data

We now have a page on citing data available on Citing Your Sources & Writing Styles. This was inspired by a recent blog post, Draft boilerplate text for journal policy on data citation.

A new creature in the biodiversity world: the data paper is an interesting post on a related topic.

See also Researchers failing to make raw data public Nature news, Sept. 14, 2011, about research published in PLoS One: Public Availability of Published Research Data in High-Impact Journals and Who Shares? Who Doesn't? Factors Associated with Openly Archiving Raw Research Data.

Here and there - Interesting sites and reading

    -- We now have online access to the Dictionary of Literary Biography. Biofolk may be interested in the extensive entry for Charles Darwin and others.
    -- The Biodiversity Heritage Library image collections are beginning to be a useful source. Searching isn't optimum but the images are lovely. http://www.flickr.com/photos/biodivlibrary/collections/72157627047804261/
    -- Want to Be a Good Researcher? Try Teaching [Chronicle of Higher Education, August 18, 2011] "Graduate students in the sciences who both teach and conduct research show greater improvement in their research skills than do those who focus exclusively on laboratory work, says a report to be published in the August 19 issue of Science. The report, "Graduate Students' Teaching Experiences Improve Their Methodological Research Skills," is notable for being among the first to examine gains in the actual research skills of graduate students rather than what they report about themselves."
    -- Do you miss me? The Biology Library has been closed for 2 years now and I do miss seeing many of you in the library, hallways, etc. I have a new introduction video you may want to view, just to remember what I look like! Keep in touch.
    -- How many research papers are freely available? A new chart from David Lipman, director of the US National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), shows that about one-third of new biomedical papers indexed in PubMed are OA. "The chart shows the proportion of papers indexed on the (largely biomedical) PubMed repository each year that are now freely accessible: in 2009, it's above 28%....Those numbers are even more impressive than a study last year which found that around 20% of research papers published in 2008 were freely available on the internet. The growth is due to various public access mandates by federal government and by funding agencies - as well as the success of open access publishers like the Public Library of Science. "What's interesting is the relatively stable linear slope here for more than 10 years," says David Lipman...."
    -- Mendeley 1.0 is here Mendeley, a free reference manager and academic social network that can help you organize your research, collaborate with others online, and discover the latest research, is no longer Beta. More information about Mendeley.
    -- The Method D list of publishers that submit to PubMed Central for NIH-funded authors continues to grow. Authors still need to monitor to ensure that deposit occurs at publication and that publishers know their work in NIH-funded.