Scholarly Communication at Texas A&M

Texas A&M University is one of the top 200 users of arXiv, an open access repository for more than 580,000 e-prints in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance and Statistics. The Texas A&M University Libraries, along with libraries at institutions including CERN, Columbia, Harvard, Los Alamos National Lab, Michigan, Oxford, and Princton, have pledged to assist Cornell University in maintaining the free availability of  research articles to researchers everywhere.  This support is a short-term funding model, as Cornell debates the best strategy for long-term viability of arXiv. It costs about $400,000 annually to maintain the repository service.

In addition to searching, downloading and reading papers from the site, Texas A&M faculty contribute pre-publication versions of research articles to arXiv.

The full text of Cornell’s press release follows. (more…)

 To promote the preservation and fuller use of data, The American Naturalist, Evolution, the Journal of Evolutionary Biology, Molecular Ecology, Heredity, and other key journals in evolution and ecology will soon introduce a new data archiving policy to ensure that data supporting published articles is preserved and made publicly available. The policy has been enacted by the Executive Councils of the societies owning or sponsoring the journals. (more…)

EXPERT PANEL CALLS ON U.S. RESEARCH AGENCIES TO DEVELOP POLICIES FOR PROVIDING FREE PUBLIC ACCESS TO FEDERALLY SPONSORED RESEARCH RESULTS

Policies Should Protect Peer-Reviewed Publications While Ensuring Rapid Access

An expert panel of librarians, library scientists, publishers, and university academic leaders today called on federal agencies that fund research to develop and implement policies that ensure free public access to the results of the research they fund “as soon as possible after those results have been published in a peer-reviewed journal.”

The Scholarly Publishing Roundtable was convened last summer by the U.S. House Committee on Science and Technology, in collaboration with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). Policymakers asked the group to examine the current state of scholarly publishing and seek consensus recommendations for expanding public access to scholarly journal articles.

The various communities represented in the Roundtable have been working to develop recommendations that would improve public access without curtailing the ability of the scientific publishing industry to publish peer-reviewed scientific articles. (more…)

Bernard Frischer will deliver the Digital Humanities lecture at Texas A&M on February 26, 2010, at 4:00 PM in Green Auditorium, Architecture Building.  The topic of the lecture is “‘Rome Reborn’: A Case Study in Digital Documentation and Publication.” 

Dr. Frischer is a Professor in the Classics Department of the University of Virginia, where from 2004-09 he also served as Director of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities. He is currently Director of the Virtual World Heritage Laboratory, whose mission is to apply 3D digital tools to simulating cultural heritage artifacts and sites as heuristic instruments of discovery. (more…)

In Washington D.C. tomorrow, an interesting cross-section of American citizenry will gather at the Newseum to celebrate a particular legal principle found in Section 107, Title 17 of the U. S. Code. Known more popularly as “the Doctrine of Fair Use”, this section of US Copyright law outlines conditions under which copyrighted works may be used, without permission of the copyright owner, for the purposes of criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research.

The First Annual World’s Fair Use Day (WFUD) is sponsored by Public Knowledge, a consumer rights advocacy group well known for its coverage of copyright policy. The day-long event is designed to bring together policymakers, artists, academics, entrepreneurs, journalists and consumer advocates to listen, watch, and learn from speeches and panel discussions, presentations, videos, films, music, and multimedia mash-ups that underscore the importance of Fair Use for creative culture, scholarship, innovation and learning.

Those outside the DC area can join in the program in a number of ways:

• Check out the event web site at http://worldsfairuseday.org/Worlds_Fair_Use_Day/Worlds_Fair_Use_Day.html
• Watch the live web stream, which will run from 9 am - 4 pm EST (stay tuned to wfud.info)
• Download and read the cool “Party Pack” which contains lots of great ideas for celebrating WFUD today, tomorrow, or whenever you want to express your love of Fair Use!

Among the presenters taking part in tomorrow’s World Fair Use Day are:

Terri Bays, from the OpenCourseWare Initiative

Dan Walsh, creator of the “Garfield Minus Garfield” web comic;

Machinima artist Chris Burke discusses, who uses fair use to produce his popular Internet Talk Show in Gamespace, This Spartan Life;

Lincoln Bandlow, an attorney who invoked the doctrine of fair use in the case Jackson Browne vs. John McCain to defend the Republican’s use of the song “Running on Empty” in a campaign ad without permission (the case was ultimately settled).