BMC Ecology image competition

CC BY Catherine Markham http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12898-015-0053-9

Each year BMC Ecology runs an image competition designed to allow ecologists to capture in a single frame their personal perspective on the 'beauty and mystery of our natural surroundings'. These images also provide a window into their specific research area:

'Ecologists can then educate as they draw attention to some of the outstanding science being done, while featuring their research efforts in a visual, and fun, way.' BMC Ecology

The overall winning image entitled “Palestinian sunbird female forages on Echinops sp.” was captured by Mohamed Sheb from the Suez Canal University Ismailia, Egypt.

CC BY Mohamed Shebl http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12898-015-0053-9.

There were 9 winning pictures, and an additional 23 that were highly commended. We highly recommend taking a look. All the pictures are published under a CC BY attribution licence so sharing them couldn't be easier too. All the pictures were published as part of an editorial here: http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12898-015-0053-9

Here's some more!

CC BY Kainaat William http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12898-015-0053-9.

CC BY Kenneth J. Chapin http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12898-015-0053-9.

Outernet: the first library in space

Outernet is a company that is organising a so-called ‘library in space’ designed to untether information from the restrictions imposed by the Internet. The Internet as a medium for transmitting information is of course a miraculous one, but access to it is highly dependent on communications infrastructure, which of course many developing countries lack.

Copyright Outernet 2015, https://outernet.is/

There have been projects in the past, and many on-going, to try and bring the Internet to the world on a universal level. One on-going project, which has been met with concerns over neutrality and data security, is the Internet.org project run by Facebook. Google’s Project Loon is another service that hopes to reach digitally isolated regions of the Earth. Project Loon uses balloons that travel around 20km above the surface of the Earth. The balloons utilise the wind currents at different altitudes to maintain their position relative to the Earth’s surface. The balloon can stay in the stratosphere for around 100 days, and can provide connectivity to a ground area of about 40km in diameter.

Outernet is a different sort of project to Loon and Internet.org. Where other projects aim to provide access to the Internet wholesale (although whether internet.org really does this is up for debate), Outernet is a project that seeks to distribute information uploaded to a library, and then distribute that information via satellite.

The lottery of where you are born, and therefore what information you have the rights to access, will eventually be cancelled out by Outernet.

-Outernet Chief Operating Officer Thane Richard International Business Times

Outernet began its operations in June 2014: “Since then we have moved quickly. Outernet is now multicasting on seven satellites covering 99% of humans with 1 GB/day and a test beam of 100 GB/day over Africa and Europe.” (https://outernet.is/about)

Outernet sell receivers called Lighthouses for $99, but they also offer instructions on how you can build your own. The receivers operate in a read only fashion allowing users to pick information (via a Wi-Fi enabled device) to view and download. Filling the shelves of 'Humanity's Public Library' posed significant challenges due to the limited bandwidth available via satellite. This is why the team behind Outernet decided early on to create a systematic set of guidelines for choosing what information should be shared (Outernet guidelines document). Essentially, the information is structured into four tiers.

Copyright Outernet 2015, https://librarian.outernet.is/en/

1. The Core Archive - this is relatively static and features content considered to be of high universal utility and importance. Such things include scientific studies, and classical works of fiction.
2. Globally Curated Content - Similar to the Core Archive but with a the additional emphasis on currency and regularly updated content.
3. Nationally Curated Content - this is information that is of local/national importance - effectively most of this information will be from newspapers.
4. Disaster information - information about natural disasters, wars, etc. is broadcast separately and given highest priority.

One of the early partners of the project was Harvard University, who agreed to upload content from their institutional repository DASH. Peter Suber, Director Scholarly Communications at Harvard said:

“Harvard supports open access to peer-reviewed faculty scholarship, and the participation of our open-access repository in Outernet is entirely consonant with our mission to enhance the distribution, visibility, and usage of Harvard research.” Outernet 2015

Syed Karim, CEO of Outernet, said:

“Broadcasting the academic content of one of the leading universities in the world is an enormous win for information equality.” Outernet 2015

Outernet also has partnerships with Wikipedia, the open access monographs publisher Project Gutenberg (http://blog.outernet.is/project-gutenberg-announces-partnership-with-outernet/), and Open Education Consortium; who offer free resources and tools for education.

New open access e-books available

The contingent of open access e-books in our library catalogue continues to grow with two new recent additions. The books, published by Cambridge University Press, are both Creative Commons licensed and are freely available to read online or download as a pdf.

Open Access and the Humanities, by Martin Paul Eve (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781316161012. CC BY-SA

http://library.st-andrews.ac.uk/record=b2173431~S5

“In the first decade and a half of the twenty-first century, the words ‘open access’ have been uttered with increasing frequency in universities around the world. Beginning as little more than a quiet murmur in niche scientific sub-disciplines but developing towards a globally mandated revolution in scholarly communication, the ascent of open access looks set to continue. Despite this rapid, worldwide rise, however, many misunderstandings about the phenomenon remain. At the most basic level, this includes the key question: what exactly is ‘open access’?” …

© Martin Paul Eve 2014, Open Access and the Humanities: Contexts, Controversies and the Future

The History Manifesto, by Jo Guldi and David Armitage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). DOI: 10.1017/9781139923880. CC BY-NC-ND

http://library.st-andrews.ac.uk/record=b2173411~S5

“We live in a moment of accelerating crisis that is characterised by the shortage of long-term thinking. Even as rising sea-levels threaten low-lying communities and coastal regions, the world’s cities stockpile waste, and human actions poison the oceans, earth, and groundwater for future generations. We face rising economic inequality within nations even as inequalities between countries abate while international hierarchies revert to conditions not seen since the late eighteenth century, when China last dominated the global economy. Where, we might ask, is safety, where is freedom? What place will our children call home? There is no public office of the long term that you can call for answers about who, if anyone, is preparing to respond to these epochal changes. Instead, almost every aspect of human life is plotted and judged, packaged and paid for, on time-scales of a few months or years. There are few opportunities to shake those projects loose from their short-term moorings. It can hardly seem worth while to raise questions of the long term at all.” …

© Jo Guldi and David Armitage 2014, The History Manifesto

4000 items milestone: Featured researcher - Dr Nicole Hudgins, University of Baltimore

As we continue to highlight the recent contributions to our growing research repository, we are reminded how the streets of Paris looked 100 years ago this month.

Paris Police photograph captioned, ‘August 1914. Arrival of refugees from the Nord and from Belgium.’ MHC/BDIC.

[Image source: Identité judiciaire (August 1914). MHC/BDIC.]

This image comes from the latest Open Access book in the series St Andrews Studies in French History and Culture: Hold still, Madame: wartime gender and the photography of women in France during the Great War, by Nicole Hudgins. This volume presents a fascinating study of the way female images were used in wartime France, and how photography and captioning presented images of traditional and non-traditional traits such as distress, devotion and toil.

Nicole Hudgins, Assistant Professor of History at University of Baltimore, liaised for over 2 years (across the Atlantic!) with the series Editor, Dr Guy Rowlands, former Director of the Centre for French History and Culture at University of St Andrews, to bring the book to fruition. A significant amount of work was involved in ensuring the work could be made available under the Creative Commons (CC-BY-NC-ND) licence. Nicole gave us an insight into this work:

The editors of the series posted a call for volumes on H-France a couple of years ago, which I happened to see.  I was interested in writing about French civilians during the war, and this interest evolved into a focus on representations of women:  There was little need to catalogue the new roles picked up by women during the war, but no one had written about how photographs were used to represent women in a particular light as part of the war effort.  Gender played a significant role in the French war effort.

Except for one meeting at a professional conference, Dr. Rowlands and I never saw each other, but racked up probably hundreds of emails over the course of my research, writing, and preparation for digital publication.  We used Dropbox to pass the manuscript back and forth.  Fortunately, the bulk of the photographs for this book come from French national collections and period magazines in the public domain., though of course we had to take extra care in preparing an open access work.  This being a book about photography, I’d venture to say that it contains more images than all the other volumes in the series combined.

The resulting book provides a fascinating visual narrative, from images of distress at the outbreak of war in 1914:

Agence Rol photograph captioned, ‘Refugees from Paris waiting at Dieppe for a boat to England’ (1914). BNF/Gallica.

[Image source: Agence Rol (1914). Bibliothèque Nationale de France/Gallica]

Devotion - capturing the fantasy rather than reality:

Photo-illustrated postcard by ‘J. K.’ entitled, ‘The dream of the Chasseur’ (postmark is 1916). Municipal Archives of Mussy-sous-Dun (Bourgogne).

[Image source: http://www.decouvrezmussy.org/rubrique%20histoire/cartespostales.htm]

To representations of women taking to the world of work (1917/18):

French Army photograph captioned, ‘Paris: Workshop of the Metropolitan [Paris subway system], rue des Maraîchers. Laborer [ouvrière] employed in the repair shop’ (1917).

 [Image source: SPA photograph in Album Valois (28 Mar 1917) MHC/BDIC]

Photo halftone illustration in Le Miroir magazine, entitled, ‘Responding to German Aerial Raids’ (1918). Subtitled ‘Acetylene welding of a large torpedo used with Allied aircraft,’ the caption explained how for ‘several weeks Allied aviation has affirmed its superiority not only on the front, during incessant offensive expeditions, bombardments and reconnaissance, but also in the numerous raids that are executed on German cities, train stations and factories, reprisals for enemy expeditions on our open cities. British aircraft, notably, deploy daily. Here is a torpedo of which our aircraft can take a number of specimens.’

[Image source: Le Miroir (21 July 1918, p7)]

Nicole went on to say:

My home institution, the University of Baltimore, and I are thrilled that my book can be studied by anyone in the world at any time.  Readers can enlarge the images for a closer look, or search the text for words and phrases.  I really think St. Andrews is at the forefront of academic publishing’s future.  They’ve seen how to reduce expense and bottleneck in order to bring the latest historical research to a wide audience.

We are delighted to see that the book has had over 70 downloads from our repository Research@StAndrews:FullText already and that she chose this route for publication. The full series is available from the repository and from Centre for French History and Culture website.

Learn more about the author at http://www.ubalt.edu/cas/faculty/alphabetical-directory/nicole-hudgins.cfm

Knowledge Unlatched pilot exceeds 200 sign-ups

The Knowledge Unlatched team are delighted to inform us that they have reached (and exceeded) the target of 200 libraries joining their pilot project to share the costs of ‘unlatching’ a collection 28 front-list titles from 13 recognised scholarly publishers.

With sign-ups from 19 countries in 4 continents the pilot has revealed the interest in Libraries worldwide in examining new business models that help to decrease the cost of monograph acquisitions. St Andrews signed up at the start of the pilot as we were also very keen to support this new model for OA publishing.

Here’s a brief explanation of how the model works:

The Knowledge Unlatched model depends on many libraries from around the world sharing the payment of a single Title Fee to a publisher, in return for a book being made available on a Creative Commons licence via OAPEN and HathiTrust as a fully downloadable PDF.

The Title Fee represents the basic cost of publishing a book. Because the Title Fee is a fixed amount, as more libraries participate in Knowledge Unlatched, the per-library cost of ‘unlatching’ each title declines. For example:

Access to the Title Fee allows publishers to feel confident that they will not make a loss on a title if it is made Open Access. Publishers are willing to provide libraries with discounts and make books available on Open Access licences if they can be assured that their core costs will be covered.

Due to the success of the pilot, the Knowledge Unlatched team anticipate that the number of sign-ups will continue to increase as will the scope and range of monographs made available for ‘unlatching’. The model is also expected to be financially self-sustaining as the costs of operating the project will be covered by a small percentage of each Title Fee.

Copyright Week: public domain and open access

From 13 - 18 January, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is hosting Copyright Week. Each day is devoted to a different issue, with participating organisations contributing blog posts and encouraging online discussions on a particular theme.

Day 2 was devoted to problems of material in the public domain not actually being publicly available, and included information from the Internet Archive which hosts several projects to address that concern.
[If you haven't tried it - have a look at the WayBack Machine for websites that have otherwised disappeared. See for example the JISC-funded TrustDR project website - content has a Creative Commons licence but no longer has a publicly hosted site.]

Day 3 (15 Jan) is focussed on Open Access, with the proposal: "The results of publicly funded research should be made freely available to the public online, to be fully used by anyone, anywhere, anytime." One blog post addressing this topic comes from the Creative Commons blog, which makes the point "the fewer restrictions are put on the public’s use of materials, the more swiftly scientific progress".

Links to the continuing discussions will be captured under 6 topics at https://www.eff.org/copyrightweek

Creative Commons 4.0 - new guidance reduces uncertainty

Following two years of development, the Creative Commons organisation has released new licences that are more user-friendly and more internationally robust than ever before. Version 4.0 licences have now been launched with changes that "make sharing and reusing CC-licensed materials easier and more dependable than ever before".

Along with the new licences there is updated guidance available that clarifies some uncertainties. The main changes are listed in What's new in 4.0, and the FAQ have been expanded to reference the new licences. Areas such as attribution are explained in detail: as well as confirming that all CC licences require users to acknowledge the creator of licensed material, there is clarification about modifying work:

"You must also indicate if you have modified the work—for example, if you have taken an excerpt, or cropped a photo. (For versions prior to 4.0, this is only required if you have created an adaptation by contributing your own creative material, but it is recommended even when not required.) It is not necessary to note trivial alterations, such as correcting a typo or changing a font size. Finally, you must retain an indication of previous modifications to the work."

The licences themselves have been re-organised with language which is easier to understand across the world, and they now include Sui generis database rights which are recognised in the European Union. The 'human-readable' licence deeds have links to definitions and further guidance, for example what is 'appropriate credit'

Creative Commons 4.0 licences are available now at http://creativecommons.org/choose/

Background to Creative Commons 4.0 development: http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Version_4

Information about Creative Commons added to libguide

Are you new to open access or hearing about Creative Commons for the first time? Do you want to know how to find content that has a specific open access licence? Have you had an article accepted for publication and need to know which Creative Commons licence you should apply to your work?

As part of our Open Access Week inititatives, we have added another page to our open access libguide which addresses these questions and points to useful resources where you can find out more.

See the new page of our guide on Creative Commons licences at http://libguides.st-andrews.ac.uk/oalicences

Shedding light on open access

Open Access Week 2012 is well under way with events being held across the world and information, resources and opinion being widely shared. A series of blog posts from Creative Commons NZ sheds light on a number of areas, including:

• Open Access in the Book Disciplines (Sigi Jöttkandt, co-founder, Open Humanities Press) - While the move towards open access is often framed in terms of journal articles, Sigi considers “the growing need for viable open access dissemination options, particularly in Humanities disciplines, which are heavily reliant on the book form.”
• Open Access and the Role of Universities in Society(David Nichols, Senior Lecturer, Department of Computer Science, University of Waikato)
• The Challenge for Scholarly Societies (Cameron Neylon, Advocacy Director, Public Library of Science) 

The first of these topics is very relevant to us in St Andrews, with our main event of the week focusing on the opportunities and challenges of open access in the humanities.

University of St Andrews Library Open Access Week event - still a few places left, see programme and booking details at: http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/library/information/furtherhelp/researchsupport/researchoutputs/openaccess/OAweek/OAhumanities/

St Andrews sunrise 24 Oct 2012

Major new open access journal publishes first articles

"eLife, the new open-access journal for outstanding scientific advancements, has published its first four research articles."

The new journal, backed by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max Planck Society, and the Wellcome Trust, is due to launch officially later this year. eLife aims to publish high quality papers 'without delay' and so has chosen to make its first open access articles available on PubMed Central and UKPMC. All articles and supplementary material in eLife will be available under a Creative Commons Attribution Licence allowing unrestricted re-use of the content provided the original source and authors are credited.

The journal is promoted as a researcher-driven initiative and innovative platform, using digital media and open access to maximise its impact. Publishing in eLife is currently free of charge to authors, and its open access model ensures research results are available to all potential readers without barriers.

http://www.elifesciences.org/ "Publishing is just the beginning"

'Explosion of openness' with Creative Commons

There are now more than 400 million works available on the internet under Creative Commons licences - allowing resources such as artworks, literature, films, learning materials and research articles to be shared and reused.

The Creative Commons organisation has released The Power of Open, a new book celebrating the impact of Creative Commons (CC) and highlighting individual stories. These include the adoption of CC for the Open University's OpenLearn website for course materials and the development of the open access publisher Public Library of Science (PLoS). The Power of Open states "The core principle behind open access journals is impact" and PLoS director of publishing Mark Patterson is quoted as saying “We set out to remove all barriers to reusing research and transforming research literature into a resource for further research,”...“CC has provided a strong, consistent signal that you can use openly published research to do with what you want”

The book also gives a useful overview of CC licences and a description of the vision for a growing culture of openness.The Power of Open © 2011 Creative Commons Corporation can be downloaded here.