OPEN SCIENCE
Who should own the intellectual property from inventions created by artificial intelligence systems? Creative Commons are advocating a cautious approach in response to a World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) call for comments. Creative Commons advocates that WIPO “should set a high bar for the creation of such new rights, consider a much lesser term of protection than that provided to the original works created by human creators, and ensure that robust exceptions and limitations are in place to uphold users’ rights, safeguard the public interest, and ensure a vibrant public domain.”
Sustainable and FAIR Data Sharing in the Humanities. A report by ALLEA, the European Federation of Academies of Sciences and Humanities. The aim is to provide recommendations for researchers in the humanities.
The messy, secretive reality behind OpenAI’s bid to save the world. OpenAI’s mission is “to ensure that artificial general intelligence […] benefits all of humanity.” Karen Ho writes in the MIT Technology Review: “The AI moonshot was founded in the spirit of transparency. This is the inside story of how competitive pressure eroded that idealism.”
PUBLISHING
The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy has launched a public Request for Information: Public Access to Peer-Reviewed Scholarly Publications, Data and Code Resulting From Federally Funded Research. This follows rumors of a potential Presidential Executive Order mandating immediate open access of federally funded research. Deadline for comments is March 16.
Read-and-Publish Open Access deals are heightening global inequalities in access to publication. In this post for the LSE Blog Jefferson Pooley argues that these deals strengthen global inequalities in publishing by predominantly supporting authors from the Global North, whilst leaving others to pay article processing charges from their own budgets — if they have any.
Elsevier saw a 3.9% increase in revenues in 2019, and an underlying adjusted operating profit growth of 3% to £982m.
Open Publishing Awards 2020. The Coko Foundation announced that the awards are back for another year. Last year’s winners are listed here.
Developing a Research Data Policy Framework for All Journals and Publishers. Paper by Iain Hrynaszkiewicz, Natasha Simons, Azhar Hussain, Rebecca Grant, Simon Goudie.
RESEARCH
Jeff Bezos Commits $10 Billion to Address Climate Change. His fund will invest in climate change related projects. Amazon itself expects to be carbon-neutral by 2040.
PLOS
PLOS and the University of California announce open access publishing agreement. “Under the agreement, which the partners are working to implement this spring, the UC Libraries will automatically pay the first $1,000 of the article processing charge (APC) for all UC authors who choose to publish in a PLOS journal.” PLOS CEO Alison Mudditt discusses new OA agreement in an interview with Richard Poynder.
Alison Muddit also wrote in The Scholarly Kitchen on the TOP Factor that launched last week: Reforming Research Assessment: A Tough Nut to Crack.
EVENTS
Open Research @ Imperial. A day of talks around key topics in Open Access and Open Research. 24 March 2020 at Imperial College London, UK.
The STM US Annual Conference 2020 is taking place from 28 – 30 April, 2020, at The National Press Club, Washington, DC.
The 2nd Workshop on Open Citations and Open Scholarly Metadata is happening on 9 – 10 September, 2020, in Bologna, Italy.
This year’s Open Access Tage are from 15 – 17 September, 2020, in Bielefeld, Germany. Call for Papers will open in March.
ORCID Germany has a workshop on “Organization Identifiers” on 12 December in Frankfurt/Main.