GLAM/Newsletter/May 2012/Contents/Open Access report

This Month in GLAM – Volume II, Issue V, May 2012

Open Access report

Open Access developments: politics and software

Open Access and governmental politics

The month started with David Willetts — Minister of State for Universities and Science of the UK — announcing an advisory role for Jimmy Wales in the country's scholarly publication system to Open Access. This was put into perspective by a special report in the Signpost. Towards the end of the month, a petition was launched towards U.S. President Obama with the aim of getting him to issue an open-access mandate for publicly funded research (see Signpost coverage).

Open Access Media Importer

Work on the Open Access Media Importer continued (GitHub repository), such that the pipeline from crawling PubMed Central to uploading to MediaWiki exists in a rudimentary form. It has already been used to generate a set of all freely and openly licensed papers on PubMed Central that are linked to malaria (cf. the Wikipedia circle on this page).

JATS-to-MediaWiki converter

Work has begun on a JATS-to-MediaWiki converter (GitHub) that would allow the XML of suitably licensed articles from PubMed Central to be imported into a MediaWiki instance.

Conferences

Talks on Wikidata and on OKF's School of Open as well as a workshop on Open Data and education were given during the Open Data Week in Nantes. Open Data was also an emerging theme during the MuseumNext conference (see Spain report).

Open Access File of the Day

The following files have been featured as Open Access File of the Day in May:

May 31: A female Selenops geraldinae Corronca eating a fly and guarding her egg sac on a bromeliad, Gaspar Grande Island, Trinidad and Tobago.
May 30: A metastasized Ewing's sarcoma.
May 29: Lateral X-ray image of a human knee, with fragmentation of the tibial tubercle.
May 28: The nomadic jellyfish Rhopilema nomadica.

May 28: The nomadic jellyfish Rhopilema nomadica.
May 27: The leaf miner Cameraria ohridella.
May 26: The tick Ixodes scapularis, a vector for Lyme disease.
May 25: A video on a petition for open-access mandates.
May 24: The fairyfly Myanmymar aresconoides in amber from Myanmar.
May 23: X-ray of a paratype of the smallest known vertebrate, the frog Paedophryne amauensis.
May 22: White matter connections illustrated with MRI tractography,
May 21: A human brain as compared to that of a chimpanzee. Scale bar: 1 cm.
May 20: The scorpion Mesobuthus longichelus.
May 19: The freshwater snail Bulinus wrighti, an intermediate host of Schistosoma haematobium.
May 18: Transmission Electron Microscopy of the Synechococcus Phage S-PM2.
May 17: Patients waiting in a hospital in Apac. Many children here suffer from malaria.
May 16: A male Enyalioides rubrigularis lizard.
May 15: A Black howler monkey (Alouatta caraya).
May 14: ECG of a patient with Fabry's disease.
April 13: Life restoration of a Hippodraco dinosaur.
April 12: The agamid lizard Draco timorensis.
April 11: A coral reef community.
April 10: The sea slug Cyerce nigricans feeding on Chlorodesmis fastigiata.
April 9: Bone scintigraphy of a patient with colorectal cancer before and after chemotherapy.
April 8: Ice age fauna of what is today's Northern Spain.
April 7: The shell of the snail Opisthostoma goniostoma from Borneo.
April 6: The shorebird Calidris canutus.
April 5: The moth Catocala johnsoniana.
April 4: Evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr.
May 3: The anthelmintic effect of papain on the nematode Heligmosomoides bakeri.
May 2: The Mlabri people in Thailand are hunter-gatherers whose ancestors practiced agriculture.
May 1: Capuchin monkeys sharing food.