Scholarly Communication in the News
The Impact of Openness and the Coronavirus
An interesting article was recently published in the Washington Post which discussed how the openness of researchers has dramatically accelerated the understanding and response to the coronavirus. The article presents the time-line from when the coronavirus was identified, sequenced and made available in the NCBI open access repository GenBank; to the latest news of an NIH preprint paper being published in bioRxiv, which had its analysis confirmed by a team of scientists in China twelve hours later.
Dimensions Releases Datasets as a New Content Source
Dimensions has now added Datasets as the sixth content type for analysis within the database. Users can now examine over 1.4 million datasets from a range of data sources. This includes datasets from Dryad, Zenodo, Pangaea; as well as Figshare hosted repositories, such as ACS, NIH, and institutional repositories such as KiltHub. More information about the inclusion of Datasets in Dimensions can be read from Dimensions Blog. Additionally, interested users can also sign up for an upcoming webinar on February 18 which will discuss the use of datasets in the system.
Measuring Research Transparency: A New Ranking System for Academic Journals
Recently announced in Times Higher Education, the Center for Open Science will be announcing a new forthcoming ranking system for academic journals measuring their commitment to research transparency. This new system will be launched in February, and will provide what many believe will be a useful alternative to journal impact scores. The jew system will include more than 300 scholarly titles from psychology, education and biomedical science. The journals will be assessed on 10 measures related to transparency, with their overall result for each category published in a publicly available league table.
Scholarly Communication at CMU
Dean Webster Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Op-Ed, "Libraries will champion an open future for scholarship"
In a recently published op-ed in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Keith Webster, Dean of the Carnegie Mellon University Libraries discusses how Open Access deals help make knowledge and education accessible to the working class.
New CMU Publisher Relationship Portal
The University Libraries have recently launched a new Publisher Relationship Portal.Through the Libraries' efforts to champion new forms of scholarly communication, we have focused on building relationships with publishers that prioritize open access and sustainability. With the recent announcements of the new agreements with Elsevier and ACM, individuals can use the portal to find information about our latest agreements, which focus on new and innovative licensing terms that place open access squarely in the forefront. The new CMU Publisher Relationship portal can be found at https://library.cmu.edu/datapub/sc/cmu-publisher-relationships.
New ACM Agreement Now in Effect
Carnegie Mellon University has joined three leading universities in entering into transformative open access agreements with the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the world's largest scientific and educational computing society.The agreements, which run for three-year terms beginning January 1, 2020, cover both access to and open access publication in ACM's journals, proceedings and magazines for these universities, and represent the first transformative open access agreements for ACM. More information about the agreement can be found on the CMU Publisher Relationship Portal at https://library.cmu.edu/datapub/sc/cmu-publisher-relationships/acm.
Open Access Updates
January APC Funded Articles
The following articles were approved for funding in January 2020:
- Adam Feinber, Faculty, Biomedical Engineering, 'Extracellular Matrix Structure and Composition in the Early 4-Chambered Embryonic Heart,' Cells.
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Seth Wiener, Faculty, Modern Languages, ' Multi-talker speech promotes greater knowledge-based spoken Mandarin word recognition in first and second language listeners,' Frontiers in Psychology: Language Sciences.
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Cleotilde Gonzalez, Faculty, Social and Decision Sciences, 'Update now or later? Effects of experience, cost, and risk preference on update decisions,' Journal of Cybersecurity.
Summary of FY '19-'20
A Summary of all articles funded in FY '19-'20 can be found here.