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Open Access report

NISO cites GLAM Newsletter; Adoption of CC BY 4.0;
Two years Open Access File of the Day

By Daniel Mietchen.
Ibycter americanus (CC BY 4.0, PLOS ONE).
Microinjection of a fluorescent dye into Ciona intestinalis eggs positioned in a microwell array (CC BY 4.0, PLOS ONE).
Hesperis theophrasti (CC BY 4.0, Biodiversity Data Journal).

NISO cites GLAM Newsletter and invites your comment

The Workgroup on Open Access Metadata and Indicators (OAMI) at the National Information Standards Organization have recently released draft recommendations for how to signal information pertaining to the use and reuse rights of scholarly articles. These include

  • a <free_to_read> tag intended to signal whether and when a publication is available publicly without a requirement for payment or registration
  • a <license_ref> tag intended to point to a URI containing the licensing terms
  • no definition of the term Open Access
  • no specification as to which licenses are allowed, or whether and how they should be version-controlled
  • no provision for icons that may be suitable for signaling the content of the proposed tags.

WikiProject Open Access is working on a Wikimedia version of such a signaling of licensing information, intended to be compatible with the NISO recommendations but more geared towards openness.

Of note, the document contains a use case very similar to that of the Open Access Media Importer (by coincidence, also abbreviated OAMI):

A user wishes to use visual images from an article, either in a single case or in some automated re-use pipeline. Acting in good faith, the user seeks licensing information, e.g., at PubMed Central or a similar source, to ascertain his/her rights. However, in some cases the article licensing metadata is contradictory or incorrect. For example, an article might be properly licensed under CC BY, but the publisher (or whoever is adding metadata) is making conflicting licensing statements or identifies other restrictions not provided for in the license.1

The reference is incorrectly formatted but intended to go to the November 2012 Open Access report in this very GLAM newsletter. The NISO document is open for comments until February 4.

Adoption of CC BY 4.0

On November 25, Creative Commons released version 4.0 of their license suite. The implications for science publishing and the CC BY license prevailing therein have been explained a few weeks later in a dedicated blog post by Puneet Kishor that accompanied BioMed Central's have announcement that, from February onwards, all of the manuscripts accepted by them or by Springer Open shall be published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (CC BY 4.0) that became available in late November and has since been determined to be compliant with the Open Definition. Other publishers have already implemented the change: of the currently 885 files in Category:CC-BY-4.0 on Wikimedia Commons, about one third (297) come from open access sources — 236 from PLOS and 61 from Pensoft.

Two years Open Access File of the Day

On December 1 in 2011, the first Open Access File of the Day was posted, and one file per day ever since. These files highlight the potential for reuse of scholarly materials in educational contexts, as well as the need for scholarly publications to be made available under open licenses to make that happen. Together, these 700+ files are used across 200 Wikimedia projects on over 30,000 pages that together gather on the order of 20 million page views per month.

The following files have been featured as Open Access File of the Day this month:

Featured content

Video of a leaping fish
  • December 31: A video of a leaping Alticus arnoldorum fish is embedded in a Scientific American post describing new research about the evolution of the camouflage colour pattern of the species. The attribution in the post to Wikimedia Commons highlights the role that Commons can play in amplifying the outreach potential of materials published in scholarly outlets.
Tetrabaena socialis - an aggregate of four cells moving together
Probability binning of flow cytometric data.
Probability binning of flow cytometric data.

Open Access Media Importer

The following represents a selection of the ca. 400 files that have been uploaded by the Open Access Media Importer this month, bringing the total to over 14,900. If you can think of wiki pages where these files could be useful, please put them in there or let us know.


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