OPEN SCIENCE
A survey by the Pew Research Center concludes that since 2016 the US public has an increasing confidence in scientists, even if policy issues remain divisive. One of the drivers for an increasing confidence are open science principles such as the sharing of data, the study finds. “Open public access to data and independent committee reviews inspire the most confidence in scientists and boost their trust in research findings.”
Sometimes copyright is irrelevant for certain use cases. A white paper on Law and Accessible Texts lays out the obligation of higher education institutions to make learning materials available to students with disabilities. They argue that in the U.S. this legal obligation trumps copyright requirements when ensuring the conversion of copyrighted material into an accessible form. Written by Brandon Butler, Prue Adler, Krista Cox from The Association of Research Libraries and the University of Virginia Library.
FAIRsFAIR Open Call for Data Repositories. The European Open Science Cloud likes to develop standards for FAIR certification of repositories. See also the workshop mentioned further below.
A shoutout to LIBSENSE, an initiative to “strengthen open access and open science in Africa.”
PUBLISHING
Low income countries have the highest percentages of open access publication: A systematic computational analysis of the biomedical literature. Paper by Jonathan Iyandemye and Marshall Thomas from the University of Global Health Equity, Kigali, Rwanda. Published in PLOS ONE.
Fact check: What you may have heard about the dispute between UC and Elsevier. A rebuttal from the University of California’s negotiating team to some of Elsevier’s statements made in relation to the UC cancellation of subscriptions to Elsevier journals.
RESEARCH
Greenland’s ice sheet is melting dramatically. In July, 197 billion tons of waters have been released into the ocean. Around 56% of Greenland’s ice sheet has seen a 1mm or more of its surface melt this season. This magnitude had only been expected by 2070. The water released in July is enough to cover Florida under 1.8m of water. Raw data available from the Polar Portal.
EVENTS
The next Open Research London meeting will take place on 10 September, 2019 from 6 – 8 pm.
As the 14th RDA Plenary Meeting on “Data Makes the Difference.” is coming up on October 23 – 25, 2019, in Helsinki, Finland, the 15th RDA Plenary Meeting has been announced for 16 – 18 March 2020, in Melbourne, Australia.
FAIRsFAIR Workshop: Building the data landscape of the future. A workshop on 22 October 2019 in Espoo, Finland.
OTHER
Elsevier is to acquire Parity Computing Inc., a company that provides Elsevier with disambiguation information around for example author or institution names. This appears to further strengthen the services portfolio of the publisher.