ANNOUNCEMENT:

We have released a demo version of a new application on OKF’s new citizen science / microtasking platform Crowdcrafting.org.

It’s called “Is It an Open Access Journal?” and looks something like this:

The new app on Crowdcrafting.org

It uses PyBossa and Disqus for comments. The code for it is available on github here too (Open Source!)

The aim of this app is to help crowdsource data on what re-use license each of the ‘open access’ journals use, and who holds the copyright.

Background

 
Open Access, as defined by the Budapest Open Access Initiative, permits any and all users to

…read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself.

But sadly, not all journals that call themselves ‘open access’ actually make their articles available under terms compliant with this definition. Many journals don’t publish under any liberal re-use license at all. This survey will help identify those journals that need to do more to ensure that they actually publish their works under an open access compliant license.

Mini-Tutorial

screengrab of the data entry bits. It’s really as simple as that…

Users are given the name of a Journal and it’s publisher.
In step one, they google search the journal to go find out the answers to the two questions asked of them.

Once the user has found the correct website for the journal, hopefully this can be investigated to find the answers, so that (step two) the correct license that this journal publishes under can be selected from the drop-down box.

Step three. The user must select who owns the copyright of each of the articles the journal publishes. Is it the author(s), the journal, the society, or unknown?

Step four. Once the user is satisfied with their answers they can click this button to save their data and move onto the next journal.

We hope that this app will help to assess, and keep current the metadata that we have on Open Access journals.