OPEN SCIENCE
The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy has extended its deadline to comment on public access to peer-reviewed scholarly publications, data, & code resulting from federally funded research. The deadline has been extended by a month, to May 6, 2020.
Researchers are addressing the shortage of ventilators for COIVD-19 patients. For example, Vanderbilt University is working on an open-source ventilator design, and researchers at MIT are developing an emergency ventilator design that can be built for $100.
Announcing a National Emergency Library to Provide Digitized Books to Students and the Public. The Internet Archive is lifting its waitlist to access digitized books. The aim is to help students with access to their collection.
PUBLISHING
The Royal Society Publishing service is making all of the society’s subscription content free to access. This removes access barriers for those working from home.
Lessons From the Open Library of Humanities. Five years in, Martin Paul Eve, Paula Clemente Vega, and Caroline Edwards summarize the lessons learned from their business model.
COPE has announced its new council members. Congratulations to these council members!
eLife have provided updated numbers on their costs of publishing. Their cost per published article has dropped to £2,200, but is still a little higher than their article processing charge. Furthermore, taking all their costs and activities into account, the fee would need to be £3,725.
cOAlition S has launched a call for an informed study of collaborative non-commercial (“Diamond”) publishing models for journals and platforms. Deadline is 24 April, 2020.
RESEARCH
One of the giants in physics has passed away on March 29. RIP Phil Anderson. A Nobel Laureate in 1977, Phil made multiple key contributions to physics, and will be much missed.
The Allen Institute for AI and partners have identified and released a dataset of over 44,000 scholarly articles about COVID-19 and the coronavirus family of viruses. Using this dataset, scite have analyzed the citations to the papers and have tracked the impact and reliability of some of these articles.
If that database may seem a bit much to digest, experts at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center have released a list of half a dozen papers that they find particularly relevant. Certainly covers some of the important topics.
As a sign of the financial pressure that in particular smaller US universities are facing during this COVID-19 pandemic, the Central Washington University has declared a state of financial exigency.
Playing the computer game Foldit can help research design new drugs against COVID-19. The game uses crowdsourcing to design proteins for biological tasks.
A COVID-19 vaccine trial is starting in Oxford, UK. It is being run by the Jenner Institute and the Oxford Vaccine Group.
EVENTS
DORA Community Call: Roles for libraries in research assessment reform. Webinar on 7 April, 2020, at 11:00 AM, EDT.