Open Access Databases Final Presentation LIS 750 Bo

Open Access Databases Final Presentation, LIS 750 Bo Johnson

Presentation Scope • • • Covering Open Access Databases Research Emphasis was on non-academic DBs (difficult, most OA databases are academic/scholarly in content) Coverage over depth, if you would like to contribute, please speak up

Outline 1. Definition of Open Access databases (OA) 2. Explore the history and philosophy behind the movement 3. Examine some criticisms 4. Explore some popular OA databases Obvious b. Not so obvious a. 5. Future of OA databases and the web

Definition Peter Suber defines OA as: "The removal of price barriers and permission barriers to online, digital information". In order to gain the title Open Access, information must be: • free of charge • copyright free • ungated online •

Definition, ctd Wikipedia defines open access as: "providing free and unrestricted access, via the internet, to peer reviewed, scholarly articles. " There are two types: • Gratis OA (no cost online access) Libre OA (Gratis plus additional usage rights) •

Definition, ctd There are two available methods for OA publishing (according to Suder and Wikipedia) 1. Green Self Archiving (publishing in any journal, non OA included, and then archiving a copy in an OA institutional repository). 2. Gold OA Publishing (essentially, an article is "born OA" and only exists in OA repositories)

What is the database part? • • • We see that OA is a movement unto itself, covering topics beyond just databases. The connection is that this information is usually stored in a database and accessed via a web based front end. OA databases are "open" in the sense that they house content that is open for all

History/Philosophy 1. First advocated by Leo Szliard in the 1940 s as a method to get young researchers and academics more journal exposure 2. Budapest Open Access Initiative (Open Society Institute, 2001): scholars should make royalty free knowledge available via the internet 3. Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing (2003): release knowledge under a perpetually free copyright [note the use of copyright to make it free]

History, ctd 4. Last major event: the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities. Essentially covers the same ground as BSOAP and BOAI, but what we see is a growing trend early in the millenium amongst western universities to put the research online •

Criticisms • • Publishers usually stand in the way. viewed as a method to attain reputation amongst scholars, ending peer review pay publications would end reputation systems taxpayer problem Necessity of modern journal articles

Quick Review • • OA is defined as the open, free, and unrestricted access to research. Two methods, gratis and libre two levels, green self archiving and gold publishing Criticized as degrading the legitimacy of journaling

Examples Traditional implementations Bio. Med Central: provides OA to mostly peer reviewed biology, biomed, and medical research. Google Scholar: I think we're familiar with this one. Med. Line: National Library of Medicine researh materials World Factbook: produced by the CIA • •

Stretching the Definition. . . Non-traditional implementations: • • US Government Data: contains all sorts of government produced data, technically not peer reviewed. UK Government Data: part of the United Kingdom's open government initiative, touches on some future applications. Estonian Government: Statistics and Open Data Agreement Wolfram Alpha

Future Applications

Questions? If time allows. If not, I will find a way to post this and you can contact me via: johnsonbjeff@gmail. com. Thanks!

Resources and Reading • • • http: //en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Open_access http: //www. earlham. edu/~peters/fos/brief. htm http: //www. earlham. edu/~peters/fos/timeline. htm http: //www. digital-scholarship. com/cwb/What. Is. OA. pdf http: //www. ncbi. nlm. nih. gov/pmc/articles/PMC 1525322/. http: //www. stat. ee/en http: //epsiplatform. eu/content/estonian-governmentagreement-open-data http: //data. gov. uk/ http: //www. data. gov/ http: //www. overcomingbias. com/2012/05/academic-