GLAM/Newsletter/May 2012/Contents/Open Access report
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Open Access developments: politics and software
ByOpen 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:
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May 31: A female Selenops geraldinae Corronca eating a fly and guarding her egg sac on a bromeliad, Gaspar Grande Island, Trinidad and Tobago.
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May 30: A metastasized Ewing's sarcoma.
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May 28: The nomadic jellyfish Rhopilema nomadica.
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May 27: The leaf miner Cameraria ohridella.
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May 25: A video on a petition for open-access mandates.
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May 22: White matter connections illustrated with MRI tractography,
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May 21: A human brain as compared to that of a chimpanzee. Scale bar: 1 cm.
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May 20: The scorpion Mesobuthus longichelus.
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May 19: The freshwater snail Bulinus wrighti, an intermediate host of Schistosoma haematobium.
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May 16: A male Enyalioides rubrigularis lizard.
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May 15: A Black howler monkey (Alouatta caraya).
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May 14: ECG of a patient with Fabry's disease.
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April 13: Life restoration of a Hippodraco dinosaur.
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April 12: The agamid lizard Draco timorensis.
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April 11: A coral reef community.
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April 10: The sea slug Cyerce nigricans feeding on Chlorodesmis fastigiata.
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April 7: The shell of the snail Opisthostoma goniostoma from Borneo.
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April 6: The shorebird Calidris canutus.
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April 5: The moth Catocala johnsoniana.
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April 4: Evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr.
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May 2: The Mlabri people in Thailand are hunter-gatherers whose ancestors practiced agriculture.
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May 1: Capuchin monkeys sharing food.