A collaborative community for planetary sciences.

Today NASA launched their Open Government Web page:

As part of the Open Government Directive, each agency will release an Open Government Plan. The plan is intended to outline concrete steps NASA can take to be more transparent, participatory, and collaborative. NASA is seeking input on the creation of this plan from its employees and the public. The mechanism for collecting and sorting these inputs is a Web site where users may submit, vote and comment on ideas. This Web site is available at: http://www.nasa.gov/open/ideas.html

I submitted an idea to Implement an Open Access Policy similar to the NIH which is not a new idea, but there you go. Submit your own, vote for (or against—yes, there are some ideas with negative scores) the Open Access Policy idea, vote for others, but do it all before March 19!

I'm late on repeating this, but the AIP had an article about a 'Roundtable forum of key stakeholders' convened by the House Science and Technology Committee and their report which offers consensus recommendations on 'Expanding Public Access to Scholarly Articles.'

At the 2009 DPS Meeting, I held a workshop on Open Access to the Planetary Sciences Literature. There weren't many people there (completely my fault for not doing more advertising for the workshop), but we did talk about the issues of Open Access in Planetary Sciences, particularly in relation to articles in Icarus, the DPS-endorsed journal.

If you can see past the buzzword doublespeak in the title, Google is trying to implement a true peer-review system that functions without a central reviewing authority. The idea is that you publish your work first, and get the reviews later. Your work's importance will then be gauged by how the reviews of your work come out as a function of time. For now this idea would complement journals, but it could eventually render them obsolete. At the least, it could make editing new online journals really easy!

Harvard's science faculty have voted to require that all papers published by faculty in the college be available to the public free-of-charge. As I understand it they are not required to publish in open access journals, but are required to be able publish in journals that allow Harvard to place a version on its website for free. Can Harvardians no longer publish in Elsevier journals like Icarus?

Wouldn't you know it, now there's a second open astronomy journal: Advances in Astronomy. This one is European, and charges 400 Euros to publish. The publisher is based in Egypt, though (!).

Has anyone any experience with including CC-licensed data (be it a photograph or whatever) in a "typical" publication like GRL or JGR? The AGU website has this singularly useless statement under manuscript preparation:

Copyrighted Material
Authors who use material (e.g., graphics, tables) from another author or copyright holder must obtain written permission to do so. This includes any figures redrawn but basically unaltered or with only slight modifications.

There's a new journal that has just launched: The Open Astronomy Journal. It seems to be entirely open access, meaning that the cost for any viewer to download the papers in it is zero. The cost to publish in it is $600 for a paper less than 8 pages, and $800 for greater than or equal to 10 pages. Nine page papers are evidently not acceptible (go figure). Is this the Open solution to planetary science publishing?

At the AGU 2005 Fall Meeting there was an under-publicized meeting on Thursday entitled the "AGU Publications Open Forum". It was held by the AGU Publications Committee, and one of the items on the agenda was "AGU plans for open access", so I decided to attend and see what they had to say on the issue.