Ithaca, NY, Boston, MA At the heart of any open source project are the people who come together to create innovative software. Today DuraSpace, a non-profit organization that combines Fedora Commons and DSpace technologies, announced a launch of their Solution Community program to extend participation in open source software development to strategic decision makers.

With over 900 repository implementations worldwide, DuraSpace Solution Communities seek to increase resources, connections, skills and ideas by engaging people at all organizational levels in order to improve open technologies and strengthen the communities that use them. By providing leadership, tools and coordination DuraSpace Solution Communities bring tech savvy decision-makers together around critical community issues to establish the conditions in which collaboration can flourish to provide durable access to our digital heritage.

Thorny Staples, Director of Community Strategy and Alliances, and Val Hollister, Director of Community Development, DSpace Project, will offer a free “All About Repositores” web seminar on Monday November 23, 2009 entitled “Take a New Look at DuraSpace Solution Communities” to introduce new tools and resources for Solution Communities (register here: http://www.education-webevents.com/). They will explain how to get involved in grassroots efforts to meet the challenges of rapidly changing information environments faced by knowledge organizations everywhere. They will also discuss the Solution Community bottom-up organizational approach based on the theory that higher levels of order will emerge from complex systems under the right conditions.

Solution Communities in Data Curation, Preservation and Archiving, Scholars Workbench, and Small Archives have begun investigations into how to leverage collective interests and priorities. To support Solution Community efforts, DuraSpace has developed a suite of tools and offers free access to anyone with an interest in participating. Individuals will find several ways to engage with Solution Communities including wikis (http://fedora-commons.org/confluence/display/FCCWG/Home) that contain a growing knowledge base, and mailing lists for specific communication around Solution Community topics. In addition, the new DuraSpace social network pilot in Crowdvine (http://duraspace.crowdvine.com/) features informal groupings for each Solution Community so individuals can connect around their particular interest.

ABOUT DURASPACE

DuraSpace (http://DuraSpace.org) is a not-for-profit organization that is the result of joining Fedora Commons and DSpace, two not-for-profits established to sustain their open source repository software. The two organizations combined forces to pursue a common mission and to expand their offerings into cloud computing and scholarly/scientific “cyberinfrastructure” for universities, libraries, and research institutions, archives, museums, NGOs, and more.

DuraSpace is committed to providing technologies and services that help ensure that our digital heritage is accessible over the long term.  Accordingly, the DuraSpace technology portfolio inherently addresses the issue of durability of digital content. Durability is not only essential for high integrity access to digital information, but it is also a necessary pre-requisite to the process of digital preservation as expressed in the DuraSpace organizational byline, “Open technologies for durable digital content.”

Mountain View, CA Register today to join Sun Microsystems Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group (PASIG) and host Northeastern University for an information-packed day focused on open computing solutions and best practices in the digital preservation and archiving space.

Duraspace will lead two breakout sessions–one focused on the DuraCloud service, and one about DuraSpace Solution Communities that provide leadership, tools and coordination around critical community issues to establish the conditions in which collaboration can flourish to provide durable access to our digital heritage.

The day will focus on finding topics of mutual co-operation in the areas of Repositories, Digital Libraries, Data Curation, Management of eScience content, and Long-Term Preservation. Experts from Harvard University, Columbia University, MIT, Sun Microsystems, and other local institutions will discuss their projects and new technologies, including open storage, sustainable preservation architectures, and new reference architectures.

Agenda items will include:

Sun PASIG focus an global trends

Sun in education

Use cases presented by local institutions

Sun technology overview and reference architecture

Breakout sessions discussing partner solutions, Storage Archive Manager (SAM) and Infinite Archive System (IAS)

Sun’s PASIG (http://www.sun-pasig.ning.com/) community provides support for organizations challenged with preserving and archiving important research and cultural heritage materials. Founding members include The Alberta Library, The British Library, Stanford University, Johns Hopkins University and other leading global libraries and universities. This is the second PASIG-related regional conference directed at fostering local collaboration. Ideas and input from this conference will be incorporated into the semi-annual global PASIG events.

Space is limited and people must register to attend: https://www.suneventreg.com//cgi-bin/register.pl?EventID=2965

This is the text of a press release from the University of California. Contact Patricia Cruise for more information.

Santa Barbara, CA Researchers at the University of California have partnered with dozens of other universities and agencies to create DataONE (http://dataone.org), a global data access and preservation network for earth and environmental scientists that will support breakthroughs in environmental research.  DataONE (Data Observation Network for Earth) is one of two $20 million awards made this year as part of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) DataNet program. The collaboration of universities and government agencies coalesced to address the mounting need for organizing and serving up vast amounts of highly diverse and inter-related but often incompatible scientific data.  Resulting studies will range from research that illuminates fundamental environmental processes to identifying environmental problems and potential solutions.

The National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) at UC Santa Barbara, the Department of Computer Science and Genome Center at UC Davis, and the California Digital Library at the UC Office of the President are integrally involved in the NSF DataONE initiative.  Across these UC partners, the several million dollar award will drive advanced research and data acquisition, storage, mining, integration, and visualization for DataONE. The resulting computing and processing “cyberinfrastructure” will be made permanently available for use by the broader UC community and international science communities. DataONE is led by the University of New Mexico, and includes additional partner organizations across the United States as well as from Europe, Africa, South America, Asia, and Australia.

“Scientists have spent hundreds of years collecting environmental data – measuring temperature, counting fish and butterflies,” says Stephanie Hampton, Deputy Director of NCEAS. “We already know quite a lot, when you estimate the volume of scientific data that must exist out there, but the challenge is to find those data sets and then put them together in a manner that helps to address the important questions for science and society. DataONE will be that portal for environmental data.”

The DataONE team will study how a vast digital data network can provide secure and permanent access into the future, and also encourage scientists to share their data. The team will help determine data and data citation standards, as well as create the tools for organizing, managing, and publishing data.

As one of five DataNet collaborations envisioned by the NSF (http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2007/nsf07601/nsf07601.htm), DataONE will build a set of geographically distributed Coordinating Nodes that play an important role in facilitating all of the activities of the global network.  The initial three Coordinating Nodes will be at UC Santa Barbara (housed at the Davidson Library), at the University of New Mexico, and at the University of Tennessee/Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

“Institutions have made extensive investments in infrastructure for managing data at their local institutions and in discipline-specific consortia, but these systems generally don’t interoperate,” says Matthew Jones, Director of Informatics Research and Development at NCEAS. “DataONE will provide a critically needed interoperability layer that will allow scientists from diverse domains to collaborate on pressing environmental science challenges.”

Scientific data integration and management also occupies computer science researchers who develop methods and tools that support all stages of the data life cycle. “Effective annotation and integration of data, and efficient management of data lineage information are hot research topics in the database and scientific workflows communities,” says Bertram Ludaescher, professor of computer science at UC Davis, whose team specializes in scientific workflow and data integration technologies, and storage and querying of data provenance.

Libraries have traditionally played a critical role in preserving and providing access to scholarly materials and recently have begun to focus on the complex challenges associated with managing scientific data.  “Libraries don’t have the capacity to address these challenges individually.  We need to partner with researchers, information technologists, and domain specialists to address these complex problems” says Patricia Cruse, Director of the UC Curation Center at the California Digital Library.

DataONE includes experts from library, computer, and environmental sciences explicitly to bridge these worlds and to develop an infrastructure to serve science for many decades to come.

About the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis

NCEAS was established in 1995. The organization has hosted more than 4,000 scientists from over 50 countries, and supported more than 430 collaborative projects in ecology and related fields. NCEAS scientists develop new techniques in informatics, and apply general knowledge of ecological systems to specific issues, such as the loss of biotic diversity, global change, and sustainability of marine ecosystems. NCEAS is among the top 1 percent of 38,000 institutions evaluated for scientific impact in environmental research. NCEAS is funded by the National Science Foundation, the state of California, the University of California and numerous other donors.  For further information contact Stephanie Hampton, Deputy Director, NCEAS, at hampton@nceas.ucsb.edu or (805) 892-2505 or Matt Jones, Director of Informatics Research and Development, NCEAS at jones@nceas.ucsb.edu.

About the UC Curation Center and the California Digital Library

The UC Curation Center (UC3) of the California Digital Library (CDL) was established in 2009.  UC3 is a central preservation and curation service provider addressing the system-wide needs of the 10 campuses of the University of California, one of the pre-eminent public universities of the world.  The California Digital Library provides digital library development and support for the University of California libraries and the communities they serve.  For further information contact Patricia Cruse, Director, UC Curation Center, at patricia.cruse@ucop.edu or 510/987-9016.

About Professor Ludaescher

Bertram Ludaescher is professor at the Department of Computer Science and a member of the Genome Center, both at UC Davis. Work in his Data & Knowledge Systems (DAKS) lab is focused on scientific workflow design and optimization, data provenance, knowledge representation, and data integration. He is  involved in several collaborative R&D projects, including the DOE Scientific Data Management Center project (SciDAC/SDM) and NSF projects to develop workflow technology (Kepler-CORE) and cyberinfrastructure for bioinformatics and environmental observatory applications.  Prof. Ludaescher received his M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Karlsruhe and his Ph.D. from the University of Freiburg, Germany. Until 2004 he was a research scientist at the San Diego Supercomputer Center and an adjunct faculty at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at UCSD.  He can be contacted at ludaesch@ucdavis.edu.

Denver, CO Join us at the All-Alliance Conference on Friday, January 29th for an exciting day of Cloud-, Data Durability-, and Repository-focused keynotes offered by Richard Katz, Vice President of EDUCAUSE and founding director of the EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research (ECAR); and Thorny Staples, Director of Community Strategy and Alliances and Director of the Fedora Project of DuraSpace.  Panel discussions, repository application overviews, and demonstration showcases are also on the agenda to mark the launch of multiple Alliance-supported digital repository portals at our member institutions! Location is at the Holiday Inn Select in Cherry Creek, Denver, CO.

On Thursday, January 28, 2010, we’re hosting a Fedora/DuraSpace technically-focused “meet-up,” led by DuraSpace’s Thorny Staples, for library and campus IT staff, faculty, and stakeholders, as well as regional Fedora community members. Topics include an exploration of repository architecture and functionality, interface strategies, cloud opportunities, and any direction the participant-driven discussion takes us!  We’ll end the afternoon with opportunities to share what’s working and what’s challenging data curation-wise at your institutions!

More information about the conference, keynotes, and registration* can be found on the Alliance web site at http://www.coalliance.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=291&Itemid=103, or contact the Alliance at 303.759.3399, or adr@coalliance.org.

This event is sponsored by the Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries with the generous support of BCR.

*Each Alliance Member Institution is welcome to send up to 8 attendees, at the Dean’s/Director’s discretion. As an alternative to designated individuals completing the online registration form, libraries may opt to send member attendees lists to geri@coalliance.org by January 8, 2010. Additional Member attendees may be subject to the general registration fee of $30/day.

New York, NY  The proposal deadline for Jasig’s March 2010 conference has been extended until Wednesday, November 25th.  If you are doing innovative work in technology for higher education, the organizers welcome you to submit a presentation!

We want to hear about new projects, large and small, and new technologies that will have an impact on higher education in the years to come.

Join us in San Diego this March:
Ten Years of Open Source Innovation
March 8 - 10, 2009
The Town and Country Resort, San Diego, California

Supplementary Seminars on March 7th and the afternoon of March 10th
Developer Workshops, March 11 - 12

Call for Proposals

Deadline for submission of proposals for half or full day seminars has passed and will not be extended. Deadline for submission of proposals for all other sessions: extended to November 25, 2009

Conference site: http://www.ja-sig.org/conferences/10spring/index.html

Dear Colleague:

Help us celebrate Jasig’s 10th anniversary in San Diego with outstanding speakers and special events.

The focus is on innovation this year. We’ll be highlighting new and established work from higher education institutions:  Projects you should know about; local projects in search of community; creative work by established communities of practice; projects that exist only as a gleam in the eye of a creative developer.

Come and see presentations and seminars on new technologies soon to impact higher education.  We’re seeking talks on topics such as Scala, Spring 3, deployment to the Cloud, Groovy, Grails, REST, Jersey, mobile applications, etc.

We invite you to propose talks, seminars, birds-of-a-feather sessions, demos, and poster session displays on new and current campus applications: Enterprise portlets, CAS, uPortal, Bedework Calendar, Identity & Access Management, Fluid, ESUP Helpdesk, OpenRegistry, Sakai, Kuali, Internet2 Middleware Solutions, Fedora and DSpace, and others.

Talks will be presented in one of four tracks:

Designing & Developing

For developers, architects, UX designers, testers. Presentations for people who build applications.

Deploying & Integrating

For people who need to make applications work on campus: developers, content providers, team leaders, evangelists. In particular, we would like to highlight work that integrates open source projects within the enterprise infrastructure and with each other.

Managing & Governing

What are best practices for managing community source projects or their deployments on campus? For encouraging adoption? For gaining acceptance and campus buy-in? For engaging your community in the processes? Presentations for managers, team leaders, executives, planners and strategists.

Looking Ahead

What are the technologies that will impact higher education in the coming years? What project work, prototypes, plans, and local campus applications would you like to share with a community of your peers?

Half-day Supplementary Seminars will be held in the morning and afternoon on Sunday, March 7th as well as on Wednesday (March 10th) afternoon.

Proposals may be entered on the Jasig Conference Website. Proposalsrequire a Title, an Abstract (under 500 words), a Presenter Profile, and some basic affiliation information.  This year we are also asking proposal submitters to select tags that best describe their proposals.

Submit your proposal directly at http://www.ja-sig.org/jasigconf/call-form.jsp?conf_id=jasig17 or from the conference home page, where you can find all the details: http://www.ja-sig.org/conferences/10spring/index.html (Click the Call for Proposals link on the left).

We look forward to seeing you at Ten Years of Open Source Innovation!

The Jasig 2010 Spring Conference Planning Committee

Earlier this month EDUCAUSE 2009 was held in the midst of concern over shrinking budgets and increasing IT needs at institutions of higher education. Several sessions and many conversations centered around how to take advantage of economies represented by new technologies such as cloud computing and distributed communication tools.

This interest was reflected in a “Point Counterpoint” session held in a small room packed to overflowing featuring Michael Dieckmann, Senior Associate VP and CIO, University of West Florida and Melissa Woo, Director, Research Cyberinfrastructure, Network and Operations Services, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who were there to shine a light on perceived cloud computing perils (Woo) and opportunities (Dieckmann).  By the numbers in the room “Cloud Computing: Hype or Hope” was was clearly of interest to many attendees who shared concerns that for higher ed in particular, it is imperative to understand the bottom line in IT services  when it comes using cloud computing services for mission-centric institutional activities.

They showed comparisons between Gartner’s Five Attributes of Cloud Computing (http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1035013) and the NIST Definition of Cloud Computing—“Essential Characteristics” (http://arielsilverstone.com/resources/nist-cloud-computing/) and contrasted these to what they believed were key characteristics for the successful use of cloud computing by university IT departments. They suggested that universities require IT (including infrastructure) as a network-delivered service that can be massively shared, is extremely flexible, and that allows for a “pay as you go” economic model.

Dieckmann pointed out that to some extent cloud computing is the way the IT industry is evolving, “Massive economies of scale will drive cloud computing because it is the most cost-effective way to provide services to our institutions.” He wondered at what point in the evolution of the service you have to ask about what the reason for doing things in the cloud is. He emphasized that we do not have to act like we are being forced to swallow a poison pill because there are many advantages, and ultimately inevitability, to adopting the use of cloud technologies.

Woo countered by asking why university IT leaders are focused on “when” instead of “why”? “Why are we not asking our stakeholders about what they need,” She queried? She used Gmail as an example of how large services go down and create security risks, data loss, and data that is “locked-up.”

Dieckman suggested that we are throwing our responsibilities “over the wall” and encouraged listeners to step out of their IT silos and think about cloud computing in a larger campus context. “It should not be all about cost,” He said.

He qualified this view by pointing out that economic sustainability coupled with green computing are driving the debate on campuses. Gathering departmental servers into central data units has already occurred. Campus customers may not care whether it’s an on-campus server or a virtual server located somewhere else. As long as systems are managed by professional systems engineers then perhaps central IT should migrate to external services.

Diekmann and Woo concurred that an evaluation of the measure of harm to campuses if you cannot trust that data will be there would be a useful decision-making tool for individual institutions. For the academy the “Crown jewel assets are our data.” Once you have transferred to an external service what do you do if the economics change?   Interoperable cloud provider standards do not yet exist that might protect institutional assets stored in the cloud.

Woo believes that IT outsourcing is a general problem that outsourcing to cloud providers only exacerbates. There is a perception that “we (campus IT) are better” than the commercial providers. The idea that things are always better on the inside than they are on the outside, however, is not always true.

Other issues around integrating in-house services with cloud services include identity management and branding in the cloud that may be threatened by across-the-board eLearning and eManagment tools. Maintaining a coherent and recognizable computing environment in the cloud is challenging right now for colleges and universities who are concerned about leveraging their digital brands in an era of increasingly competitive and distributed online learning.

By Thorny Staples, Director of Community Strategy and Alliances and Director of the Fedora Project, DuraSpace

The purpose of the Scholars Workbench group and other solutions community groups is to create opportunities for people who are interested in topics that strongly relate to the DuraSpace mission (everything that relates to the problem of the durability of digital information, in short) to find each other. The idea is that if people can find each other and begin to share information, we can possibly create the conditions for true collaboration to develop. We are hoping to involve technically-aware decision makers who have resources to share, along with anyone who has an strong interest in the subject.

It seems to me that the focus of the Scholars Workbench community should be the idea that all information that is created in the process of scholarly and scientific activities should flow into repositories, from which it can then be used in the most effortless ways; it is always possible to make the decision to throw content away later, but it is not always possible to collect it after the fact.

Rather than being focused on creating the perfect complete application, it seems we should be focused on assembling the set of interfaces, standards and tools that can best be used to connect repositories like DSpace, Fedora and EPrints to the tools that have flexible, adaptable input/output capabilities. Ideally, this group could get to the point
where most of us are working on the smart tools sooner rather than later. I could imagine getting a subgroup going that was particularly interested in the I/O issues, with most of us concentrating on the tools that help in the content creation workflows, and the analysis and publishing activities that are ultimately the point. I would hope that
a lot of this work would be in adapting a lot of what has already been done.

Please visit http://www.fedora-commons.org/confluence/display/FCCWG/Scholars+Workbench for more information, or to join the Scholars Workbench Solution Community mailing list.

Ithaca, NY, Boston, MA Registration for the final four DuraSpace/Sun/SPARC 2009 “All About Repositories” web seminars is open. Topics include DuraSpace solution communities, open storage SAM architectures, DuraCloud Pilot Project information and how to make open scholarship happen with Creative Commons liscensing (Jan. 2010). You may register for any or all of these free web seminars at http://www.education-webevents.com/ where you may also download past “All About Repositories” web seminars.

Take a New Look at DuraSpace Solution Communities
Monday, November 23, 2009
Time: 10:00am PT, 1:00 ET

DuraSpace Community leaders, developers and users leverage open technologies to implement more than 1,000 repositories worldwide.  All together they face tough issues within the context of the open source development process.  DuraSpace Solutions Communities bring tech savvy decision-makers together around critical community questions to establish the conditions — resources, knowledge and skills — in which collaboration can flourish.

Join Thorny Staples, Director of Community Strategy and Alliances, and Val Hollister, Director of Community Development, DSpace Project, to find out about new tools and resources that are now available for Solution Communities, and how to get involved in grassroots efforts to meet the rapidly changing challenges in knowledge organization environments during this 60 minute free web seminar.

Open Storage SAM Architectures
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Time: 8:00am PT, 11:00 ET

Experts will review Sun Open Archive technologies and Storage Archive Manager (SAM)-based architectures for repositories.  This webinar will cover the needs for industry standards-based products, managing technology for a long-term archive, planning for disaster recovery, and key solutions that are optimized on Sun open storage.  This webinar is targeted at repository and preservation project managers just starting to explore the present and future IT needs of their repository.

Repositories in the Cloud: How to Participate in the DuraCloud Pilot Program
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Time: 10:00am PT, 1:00 ET

The DuraSpace organization is conducting a pilot program to test a new cloud-based service, DuraCloud. Cloud technologies use remote computers to provide local services through the Internet. DuraCloud lets an institution provide data storage and access without having to maintain its own dedicated technical infrastructure. Attend this web seminar presented by Michele Kimpton, CBO DuraSpace, to find out how your organization can participate.

Enabling (Open) Scholarship
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Time: 10:00am PT, 1:00 ET

Institutional/Discipline Repositories providing the world with scholarly work in an Open Access fashion is the solid foundation on which we can build a fully open scholarship community.  Greg Grossmeier, Community Assistant, Creative Commons will provide the background of Creative Commons, and what it is doing to enable the open scholarship community.

Ithaca, NY  DuraSpace open technologies, projects and partners are discussed and analyzed in press releases, reports, media, and numerous blogs. The following references are links to what others have been saying about DuraSpace–DSpace, Fedora Commons and our community–in 2009.

Closer to home, DuraSpace open technology/open access news and events are reflected out regularly through the DuraSpace Blog at http://expertvoices.nsdl/DuraSpace and through Web sites. You may subscribe to the RSS for this blog at http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=DuraSpace. Follow DuraSpace breaking news and information on Twitter at http://twitter.com/DuraSpace.

Cloud Computing and Repositories: Fedorazon Final Report                                                                                                    [Digital Koans] Fedorazon is an early, experimental, out-of-the-box version of the Fedora Commons repository software preconfigured for cloud installation.                                                                                                              http://digital-scholarship.org/digitalkoans/2009/11/03/cloud-computing-and-repositories-fedorazon-final-report/

The Cloud, the Researcher and the Repository                                                                                       [Repository Man blog] “There’s currently a lot of buzz about DuraSpace, the DSpace and Fedora project to incorporate cloud storage into repositories.”

http://repositoryman.blogspot.com/2009/02/cloud-researcher-and-repository.html

Getting Started with Fedora                                                                                                      [Digital Koans] “Whether you want to adopt one of the existing Fedora-based solutions or develop you own, this general introduction should be useful to you.”

http://digital-scholarship.org/digitalkoans/2009/10/08/getting-started-with-fedora/

HOWTO Install Fedora-Commons Repository on Debian                                                                                                     [Fak3r blog]  “My Super, simple HOWTO get Feodora-commons up and running in a development environment in Debian GNU/Linux or Ubuntu Linux.”

http://fak3r.com/2009/03/17/howto-install-fedora-commons-repository-software-on-debian/

Institutional Repository on a Shoestring                                                                                                     [DLib Magazine] The authors describe Humboldt State University’s (HSU), one of the smaller campuses in the 23-member California State University (CSU) system, digital repository project based on DSpace.                                                  

http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january09/wrenn/01wrenn.html

MIT Open Access Articles Collection Launched in DSpace@MIT                                                                                         [Digital Koans] MIT has launched a new collection of authors’ final submitted manuscripts in DSpace@MIT, the MIT Open Access Articles Collection.

http://digital-scholarship.org/digitalkoans/category/dspace/

Sun Microsystems Showcases Open Source Technologies at Educause 2009: Implementing Change at Columbia University Libraries                                                                                [Sun Microsystems Virtual Press Office] “Columbia’s integration of the SAM technology, a combination of StorEdge ™ 6140, 4500 and L500 tape storage media technologies, along with Fedora Commons Repository Software from duraspace.org allows it to remotely locate and manage digital artifacts on three tiers of storage in geographically disparate locations for long-term content preservation.”                             

http://www.virtualpressoffice.com/publicsiteContentFileAccess?fileContentId=199780&fromOtherPageToDisableHistory=Y&menuName=News&sId=273&sInfo=Y

Webinars Focus on Cloud Computing, Institutional Repositories, and Open Access                                                                                                                           [Wake Forest University Professional Development]  “Webinars that look at cloud computing and its role in institutional repositories.”

http://blog.zsr.wfu.edu/pd/2009/09/22/webinars-focus-on-cloud-computing-insitutional-repositories-and-open-access/

Word+SWORD+Ingester=Word to DSpace Deposit                                                                                                                          [Digital Koans] “Stuart Lewis describes how to get documents into DSpace from Word via SWORD and a custom DSpace ingester.”

http://digital-scholarship.org/digitalkoans/2009/07/05/word-sword-ingester-word-to-dspace-deposit/

Please contact DuraSpace if you have a news to share, or if your project has recently appeared in the press.

SPARC Alliance for Taxpayer Access press release. Contact Jennifer McLennan for more information (202) 296-2296

Washington, DC  “For America to obtain an optimal return on our investment in science, publicly funded research must be shared as broadly as possible,” is the message that forty one Nobel Prize-winning scientists in medicine, physics, and chemistry gave to Congress in an open letter delivered yesterday. The letter marks the fourth time in five years that leading scientists have called on Congress to ensure free, timely access to the results of federally funded research – this time asking leaders to support the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2009 (S.1373).

The Nobel Prize-winners write:

“As the pursuit of science is increasingly conducted in a digital world, we need policies that ensure that the opportunities the Internet presents for new research tools and techniques to be employed can be fully exploited. The removal of access barriers and the enabling of expanded use of research findings has the potential to dramatically transform how we approach issues of vital importance to the public, such as biomedicine, climate change, and energy research. As scientists, and as taxpayers too, we support FRPAA and urge its passage.”

The bi-partisan Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA), introduced by Senators Lieberman (I-CT) and Cornyn (R-TX), would deliver online public access to the published results of research funded through eleven U.S. agencies and departments, requiring that peer-reviewed journal articles stemming from publicly funded research be made available in an online repository no later than six months after publication.

The Nobelists note that enabling access to this information would be an important contribution in fostering innovation and fueling positive economic and social returns:

“The open availability of federally funded research for broad public use in open online archives is a crucial building block in laying a strong national foundation to support accelerated discovery and innovation.  It encourages broader participation in the scientific process by providing equitable access to high-quality research results to researchers at higher education institutions of all kinds – from research-intensive universities to community colleges alike. It can empower more members of the public to become engaged in citizen science efforts in areas that pique their imagination. It will equip entrepreneurs and small business owners with the very latest research developments, allowing them to more effectively compete in the development of new technologies and innovations.  Open availability of this research will expand the worldwide visibility of the research conducted in the U.S. and increase the impact of our collective investment in research.”

The full text of the letter is online at http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/supporters/scientists.

The Federal Research Public Access Act would build upon the success of the first U.S. requirement for public access to publicly funded research, through the National Institutes of Health. It is widely supported by a broad set of stakeholders, including: scientists, higher education leaders, librarians, consumer and economic groups (including the Committee on Economic Development), technology companies (including Amazon.com, Ask.com, Bloomberg, eBay, Google, Yahoo!, and state and local ISPs), publishers, patients and patient advocates, and major national and regional research organizations. For full details on support for the Act, visit http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/frpaa.

The Alliance for Taxpayer Access calls on organizations and individuals to write in support of the bill through the Web site at http://www.taxpayeraccess.org.

For more information about the Federal Research Public Access Act, visit http://www.taxpayeraccess.org.

The Alliance for Taxpayer Access is a coalition of advocacy, academic, research, and publishing organizations that supports open public access to the results of federally funded research. The Alliance was formed in 2004 to urge that peer-reviewed articles stemming from taxpayer-funded research become fully accessible and available online at no extra cost to the American public. Details on the ATA may be found at http://www.taxpayeraccess.org.