{"id":7103,"date":"2013-02-28T16:38:35","date_gmt":"2013-02-28T21:38:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/dplaalpha\/?p=7103"},"modified":"2013-02-28T16:40:07","modified_gmt":"2013-02-28T21:40:07","slug":"digital-library-digest-february-28-2013","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dplaalpha\/2013\/02\/28\/digital-library-digest-february-28-2013\/","title":{"rendered":"Digital Library Digest: February 28, 2013"},"content":{"rendered":"

Obama administration creates new policy to make federally funded research results open to the public\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

“If you paid for it, you should be able to read it. For publicly financed science research, the Obama administration agrees.<\/p>\n

“In a memorandum issued on Friday, John P. Holdren, science adviser to President Obama, called for scientific papers that report the results of federally financed research to become freely accessible within a year or so after publication. The findings are typically published in scientific journals, many of which are open only to paying subscribers.<\/p>\n

“The new policy would apply to federal agencies, including the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy and the Department of Agriculture, that finance more than $100 million a year of research. The agencies have six months to submit plans for how they would carry out the new policy.<\/p>\n

“The hope is that broad access to scientific results will encourage faster progress on research and will let anyone apply the knowledge for technological advances.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have seen, over the last 15 years, in the era of the Internet, that the more widely available a publication is, the more likely it is to be cited and the more likely it is to be used in patent applications,\u201d said Myron Gutmann, an assistant director at the National Science Foundation.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe know that the small and medium enterprise, the business community, doesn\u2019t have a lot of access to scientific publications right now,\u201d Dr. Gutmann said, \u201cand the more we can make things available for those communities, the more innovation there is likely to be.\u201d He estimated that 25,000 to 40,000 journal articles based on research financed by the science foundation are published annually.<\/p>\n

“At the Agriculture Department, Catherine Woteki, the agency\u2019s chief scientist, said the new policy fit in with efforts to make agriculture data like plant genomes more widely available. \u201cWe can reduce in half the time that it takes for breeding drought- and pest- and disease-resistant crops,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

“The agencies could model their policies on one established by the National Institutes of Health in 2008. The N.I.H. requires scientists receiving grants to ensure that their papers can be made available on PubMed Central, a publicly available Web site, within one year.<\/p>\n

“An online petition last May on the White House\u2019s Web site called for \u201cfree access over the Internet to scientific journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research.\u201d<\/p>\n

“More than 65,000 people signed the petition, easily passing the 25,000-signature threshold that merited an official White House response. (The threshold was raised in January to 100,000 after a petition that called for building a Death Star like that in the movie \u201cStar Wars\u201d garnered 34,435 signatures; administration officials rejected that suggestion.)<\/p>\n

“In a response posted Friday to the signers of the open-access petitioners, Dr. Holdren agreed.<\/p>\n

\u201cAmericans should have easy access to the results of the research they help support,\u201d Dr. Holden wrote, adding, \u201cthe logic behind enhanced access is plain.\u201d<\/p>\n

From Kenneth Chang’s article on<\/em> The New York Times article<\/em>, U.S. Moves to Provide Quicker Access to Publicly Financed Scientific Research<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0New electronic editions of classic works filled with multimedia enhance the classroom experience<\/strong><\/p>\n

“When asked why he studies John Steinbeck\u2019s\u00a0Of Mice and Men<\/em>\u00a0with his students, Matthew Kalafat responds, \u201cit get kids thinking\u2014critically,\u201d and notes that the debates that follow allow his 8th graders to become \u201cmore confident, more engaged readers.\u201d Both Kalafat and Derrick Nelson are educators featured in Penguin\u2019s recently released\u00a0Of Mice and Men: Teacher\u2019s Deluxe Edition<\/em><\/strong><\/a>\u00a0($11.99; Gr 8 Up), available on a variety of electronic devices. Along with video commentary from the two, the iBook contains the full text of Steinbeck\u2019s novel, a lengthy introduction by Susan Shillinglaw; the Robert Burns\u2019s poem from which the book title derives (\u201cTo a Mouse, On Turning Her up in Her Nest with the Plough, November 1785,\u201d); and the text of Steinbeck\u2019s Nobel Prize acceptance speech.<\/p>\n

“Lists of discussion questions on topics ranging from \u201cthe American Dream\u201d to \u201cFate\u201d are included and paired with brief video responses by students. The questions and the videos emerged from a collaboration between two schools separated by four miles, but, as one of the educators commented, \u201cmight as well be 4,000 miles apart\u2014there\u2019s not much interaction\u201d between these kids. Kalafat and Nelson also describe other aspects of the project from heated wiki conversations to meetings to discuss the classic in person.<\/p>\n

“Why this this collaboration?\u00a0 At an age when students are just beginning to question \u201cthe world around them\u2026to look beyond themselves,\u201d Kalafat felt that studying and discussing literature with people who were \u201cdifferent from themselves\u201d offered students fresh perspectives on the novel. He added that while the themes addressed weren\u2019t especially difficult, they \u201cfire[d]up\u201d the participants\u2019 imaginations and gave rise to spirited debate. In a final assignment, students discuss their dreams as young children, and today, and how and why they have changed.”<\/p>\n

From Daryl Grabarek’s article on the<\/em> School Library Journal, Deluxe and Digital | Steinbeck\u2019s \u2018Of Mice and Men\u2019<\/a><\/p>\n

20 new videos about different Harvard Library Innovation Lab projects and programs<\/strong><\/p>\n

“Here\u2019s some very interesting viewing for library\/database\/information retrieval types (geeks).\u00a020 new videos about different Harvard Library Innovation Lab projects and programs including Library Cloud and the Awesome Box project that we mentioned the other day.<\/p>\n

“You\u2019ll not only learn about the projects but you\u2019ll also meet some of the people responsible for them.\u00a0From tracking mobile usage to converting MARC to RDA to social tagging and MUCH more there is a lot of interesting material here for everyone.\u00a0We\u2019ve embedded all of the new videos below. Most run between 2-4.5 minutes and the blurbs below each video were provided by Harvard.<\/p>\n

“Sit back, relax, and learn.”<\/p>\n