Edition 2022.06
White House OSTP Memo on Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research
The big news of the last week was the Biden US government announcing a new policy requiring open access to both research publications and the data behind them with no embargo period, for all research funded by any US Government body. This is huge, for two reasons. The first is that “gold” open access – whereby researchers pay a bribe to a parasitic corporation so that the research paper they donated to the publisher is actually made public (i.e. “published”) – does not comply with this new policy. Research and data will have to be deposited in an approved repository (“green” OA). The second is that the US government is not mucking around on the implementation timetable. Every relevant US government department must have a plan in place for implementing this policy by the end of this year, and they have 12 months to carry out that plan.
Ginny Barbour explains in The Conversation what the implications are in the Australian context.
Automating Authority Control Processes
Another one from the Code4Lib archive, Stacey Wolf explains authority control, why it matters, and some options for automating processes for keeping library authority files up to date not matter the size of your library or collection.
Why Sharing Academic Publications Under “No Derivatives” Licenses is Misguided
An interesting article from Brigitte Vézina on the Creative Commons education blog. Some of this article is a bit of a stretch, but the key point comes at the end – copyright law was not designed to enforce academic integrity and isn't effective at doing so :
Overall, copyright law and CC Licenses are not the most appropriate frameworks to address problems of academic integrity. Better results can certainly be achieved through compliance with and enforcement of relevant, well-established and enduring institutional and social norms, ethics policies, and moral codes of conduct.
Libraries and Learning Links of the Week is published every week by Hugh Rundle.
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