Issue 84

Open Science Newsletter

PUBLISHING

Some of the notable items from this past Peer Review Week:

How the Internet Archive is Ensuring Permanent Access to Open Access Journal Articles. Not all open access journals are participating in archive schemes like LOCKSS or CLOCKSS, and a study by Laakso et al. has found that a number of journals have vanished without trace. The Internet Archive is trying to contribute, and has created an editable catalog to identify the relevant literature for archiving.

JATS4R has a consultation on new items for peer review materials in the XML for published papers. Deadline for posting comments is 30 October. 

RESEARCH

The US National Academy of Sciences can now kick out harassers. So why hasn’t it? According to this Nature News item, it appears as if there is a reluctance for formal complaints being filed about harassers. Those complaints are essential to the formal workflow that the National Academy has instituted. 

The hysteresis of the Antarctic Ice Sheet. This Nature paper is presenting sobering news of sea level rises as the climate changes, based on the melting of the Antarctic Ice Sheet. For temperature changes up to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the forecasted rise in sea level is 1.3 meters per each degree of warming, and considerably more than that for further degrees of warming. Even if temperatures were to drop again the process won’t reverse easily.

EVENTS

The public launch event of the Initiative for Open Abstracts (I4OA) is taking place online on 5 October, 2020, at 10am – 11.30am ET.

The program for the Creative Commons global summit on 19 – 23 October has been released.

Open Data Day 2021 will take place on 6 March, 2021. Facilitated by the Open Knowledge Foundation, this brings together groups from all over the world.

OTHER

Perhaps just for fans like me, but Studio Ghibli has released a library of 400 stills from their movies, free to use. The license terms, according to Google Translate, unfortunately appear to be fairly vague: “Feel free to use it within the bounds of common sense.” Here is an example from Spirited Away:  

Photo from Spirited Away