Among the plans the government hopes will advance its strategy are proposals to establish an Open Data Institute to "ensure that Open Data research is transformed into commercial advantage for UK companies, work with academic centres to increase the number of trained personnel with extensive Open Data skills and provide expert advice for government," BIS said.

The government will also force Research Councils to "ensure the researchers they fund" comply with an existing requirement to "deposit published articles or conference proceedings in an open access repository at or around the time of publication". Currently this is "unevenly enforced," BIS said.

The Research Councils have also committed to investing £2m to develop a 'Gateway to Research' by 2013, BIS said.

"In the first instance this will allow ready access to Research Council funded research information and related data but it will be designed so that it can also include research funded by others in due course," the report said. "The Research Councils will work with their partners and users to ensure information is presented in a readily reusable form, using common formats and open standards".

Summary of how the naïve reader is alerted to paper retraction (from Table 2)

• Watermark on PDF (41.1%)
• Journal website (33.4%)
• Not noted anywhere (31.8%)
• Note appended to PDF (17.3%)
• pdf deleted from website (13.2%)

Some discussion around the issue of retracted scholarly papers and whether the growing rate represents a problem (more people acting corruptly in submitting papers) or a solution (more poor papers being detected).

As Cameron Neylon noted in his recent UKSG talk, there is value in knowing the what, why and who of a paper being retracted so the 45% represented by the 3rd and last bullet points above (45% of a relatively small proportion of published papers admittedly) is pretty unhelpful in terms of scholarly communication.

Cameron's presentation also showed a steeply rising graph of retracted papers (slide 56 of http://www.slideshare.net/CameronNeylon/the-gatekeeper-is-dead-long-live-the-..., growing to somewhere around 30 retractions per 100k papers in 2010, which made the situation look worse than seems to be being presented here?

• Recommendation 1: any organisation considering adopting any cloud services for mission-critical applications, or for processing personal or otherwise sensitive information, should obtain specialist legal advice regarding their contracts and SLAs.
• Recommendation 2: JISC should investigate the issues surrounding the management and preservation of research data in cloud systems, and produce guidance aimed at researchers. This should support risk assessment and management, and should not design or develop technical solutions.
• Recommendation 3: JISC should investigate mechanisms for national engagement, negotiation and procurement of cloud services, primarily with AWS, Google and MS, but allowing for the engagement of smaller, niche providers.
• Recommendation 4: The NGS, and its funders, should consider whether there is a role for that organisation in supporting the development of virtual machine images for common research codes, to allow users to deploy them easily within commercial and private clouds. This may include liaising with or funding the developers or maintainers of the codes.
• Recommendation 5: unless backed by clear evidence of demand, and a robust and revenue-neutral business case, JISC should not support the development of a production UK academic research cloud.

Taken from the executive summary of a study funded last year. I hadn't spotted this report before. Its recommendations are pertinent to the UMF 'cloud' activity (particularly the JANET Brokerage service, advice being developed by DCC and the pilot cloud infrastructure that we are involved in) and to our forthcoming symposium.

Open peer review—which gives anyone who’s interested a chance to weigh in on scholarly content before it’s published—just got an institutional boost. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has given New York University Press and MediaCommons a $50,000 grant to take a closer look at open, or peer-to-peer (P2P), review, the press announced today. MediaCommons is a digital scholarly network hosted by the NYU Libraries and affiliated with the Institute for the Future of the Book.

The idea of P2P review has generated a lot of interest in the humanities lately. Last year, for instance, Shakespeare Quarterly tried its first-ever open peer review experiment with a special issue on Shakespeare and new media. That went well enough that the journal decided to try it again, this time with a forthcoming issue on Shakespeare and performance.

From the Chronicle of Higher Education. Looks interesting...

Put another way, when anything can be published, there is no prestige associated with being published, so prestige must be introduced in other ways.  Evangelists for Open Science should focus on promoting new, post-publication prestige metrics that will properly incentivize scientists to focus on the utility of their work, which will allow them to start worrying less about publishing in the right journals.

More or less what I was suggesting on eFoundations last week.

Taking all these factors into account, our view is that the prudent stance for policy-makers seeking to promote access in the current environment is likely to be as follows:

• to encourage the use of existing Green infrastructure (whose costs are largely sunk); but to be cautious about pushing for reductions in embargo periods to the point where the sustainability of the underlying publishing model is put at risk.
• in parallel, to work to facilitate a transition to Gold OA (in specific disciplines first) provided that (i) the average level of APCs remain at or below £1,995;43 (ii) the proportion of articles funded through APCs moves broadly in line with global rates; and (iii) mechanisms are in place to ensure that total payments from UK universities and their funders do not rise as a consequence of this transition.

A new study commissioned by the Research Information Network (RIN), JISC, Research Libraries UK (RLUK), the Publishing Research Consortium (PRC) and the Wellcome Trust, the main conclusion of which feels a bit like a 'protect the status quo' stance (in terms of the underlying way that scholarly communication works). Which is fine. I'd mention the moving of deckchairs on the Titanic but the 'sinking' analogy isn't right... perhaps the dropping of CD prices in HMV (a struggling UK-wide music outlet) is a better analogy? Hmmm... no, that's not quite right either. Academic publishing is a strange market!

It feels like the web should be having a more disruptive impact (on scholarly communication) than it is. I presume that it isn't because the weight of academic inertia - can inertia have a weight? probably not! but anyway... - the weight of academic inertia is too great to overcome and because the associated market isn't open or big enough to see more rapid change?

Scope of ScHTML. It’s a community-based activity, re-using best practice, but with minimal entry barriers. IOW it can apply to almost every public activity in scholarship (research, education, reference, record). It is not just for submitting publications – it can manage student essays, lab notebooks, Wikipedia entries, chemical databases, etc. See the FAQs http://okfnpad.org/schtml-faqs YOU can contribute questions or suggested answers.

Technology of ScHTML. The minimum entry is simply to be able to create modern well-formed HTML5. Everything beyond that is done by evolving agreements (“conventions”). It can, if necessary, be edited by hand, though we are obviously keen to create a flexible toolchain. In practice this is often already present and a matter of identifying current good tools and good practice.

News from Peter Murray-Rust about the Scholarly HTML (ScHTML) initiative - an activity to develop an HTML5-based markup language for scholarly communication.

Interesting...

Amongst other things, he notes the social and political aspects of this work and the lack of a packaging standard for HTML (which is given as one of the reasons for the current predominance of formats like PDF).

On the latter issue, it is worth noting that HTML5 (as with all other HTML variants) is explicitly a markup language for the Web. Scholarly communication evolved largely off the web. It is not that surprising that there is something of a tension here. This is one of the reasons why it would be nice(r) to see a discussion around changing how scholarly communication happens, given the huge changes brought by the web and social media, rather than just talking about what format is used to ship scholarly content around. In the main, packaging isn't an issue for the web because the distributed nature of stuff is just part of the way things work. It only becomes an issue when you want to talk about non-web approaches, like journals (irrespective of whether they happen to be surfaced on the web or not) that it really becomes an issue. That said, scholarly communication brings with it some particular challenges, like preservation for example, that aren't a major issue for much of the mainstream web. Discuss!

On the former, Peter cites Wikipedia as a (not very good) analogy for the community development of a technology like ScHTML. Seems an odd choice? Looking to community-led standards forums like, say, the Dublin Core, IETF or OASIS might be a better place to start?

Wikipedia is now widely regarded as a mature project and is consulted by a large fraction of internet users, including academics and other experts. However, many of them are still reluctant to contribute to it. The aim of this survey is to understand why scientists, academics and other experts do (or do not) contribute to an open collaborative project such as Wikipedia, and whether individual motivation aligns with shared perceptions of Wikipedia within expert communities. We hope this may help us identify ways around barriers to expert participation.

The survey is anonymous and should take about 10 min to complete. It consists of a short introduction, followed by two main sections in which we contrast shared perceptions and personal motivation, and a final section where you can tell us more about yourself. At the end of the survey, you will find a link to follow the results and the ensuing conversation.

A potentially interesting attempt to understand 'academic' attitudes to Wikipedia.

If you are a scientist, academic or otherwise consider yourself an expert, it'd be worth considering completing this survey.

‘At the moment researchers are using a dizzying array of different applications to communicate and collaborate,’ said colwiz Chief Scientist Professor David Gavaghan of Oxford University. ‘These might include Google Apps, Microsoft Live Services, LinkedIn, Yammer and Social Text. But because these are separate applications they don’t do everything and don’t always talk to each other, and this slows researchers down. colwiz replaces this hotchpotch with an integrated suite of tools custom-built for fast and efficient management of the research process.’

University of Oxford in 'large pieces, tightly coupled' shock!?

"The colwiz (‘collective wizdom’) R&D platform manages the entire research lifecycle from an initial idea, through a complex collaboration, to publication of the results."

I can't try this app, not having a university email address but from the screen shots, it looks nicely done - huh... but what can you tell from screen shots! My worry, is with the breadth of functionality that it is trying to support. It's like a VLE for researchers... but we are already seeing people getting fed up with the monolithic approach of your average VLE - wanting to move instead towards the more open 'small pieces, loosely joined' approach of the PLE. This announcement takes researchers in the opposite direction.

It'll be interesting to see if it takes off - but I won't be holding my breath.

The Committee welcomes submissions on all aspect of the process and among the issues it is likely to examine are the following:

1. the strengths and weaknesses of peer review as a quality control mechanism for scientists, publishers and the public;
2. measures to strengthen peer review;
3. the value and use of peer reviewed science on advancing and testing scientific knowledge;
4. the value and use of peer reviewed science in informing public debate;
5. the extent to which peer review varies between scientific disciplines and between countries across the world;
6. the processes by which reviewers with the requisite skills and knowledge are identified,  in particular as the volume of multi-disciplinary research increases;
7. the impact of IT and greater use of online resources on the peer review process; and
8. possible alternatives to peer review.

Slightly odd that there is no mention of costs? Is that because the costs of peer review are well understood?