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The mid-June issue of Walt Crawford's Cites & Insights is devoted to Catching Up with Copyright. The copyright issues are indirectly related to OA, as usual. But two parts are more directly OA-related: (1) a section on Saving the Public Domain, on Eldred v. Ashcroft and Kahle v. Ashcroft, and (2) a critique of Jason Griffey's master's thesis, which argued that the ALA should live up to its public statements and provide OA to its publications. Excerpt: "Should the refereed articles [in ALA publications] also be posted online and freely available? Yes, I believe they should --and I believe divisions would welcome that discussion. But that's a different discussion, one that has little to do with 'the perils of strong copyright.' Griffey is to be congratulated for a thoughtprovoking paper and for pushing the suggestion that ALA and its divisions work on putting proclaimed beliefs more thoroughly into practice. There are flaws in the paper, but he raises useful points." New report documents connection between democracy and public access to information
Nancy Kranich, The Information Commons: A Public Policy Report, The Free Expression Policy Project, June 8, 2004. From the executive summary: "Libraries, civic organizations, and scholars have begun to turn the idea of the commons into practice, with a wide variety of open democratic information resources now operating or in the planning stages. These include software commons, licensing commons, open access scholarly journals, digital repositories, institutional commons, and subject matter commons in areas ranging from knitting to music, agriculture to Supreme Court arguments. These many examples of information sharing have certain basic characteristics in common. They are collaborative and interactive. They take advantage of the networked environment to build information communities. They benefit from network externalities, meaning that the greater the participation, the more valuable the resource. Many are free or low cost. Their governance is shared, with rules and norms that are defined and accepted by their constituents. They encourage and advance free expression." Kranich, a past president of the American Library Association, has entire sections on open access and digital repositories. More on the Elsevier postprint archiving policy
Mark Chillingworth, Elsevier allows article publishing on personal and institutional sites, Information World Review, June 8, 2004. Excerpt: "Scientific journal giant Elsevier is allowing its authors to publish their works on personal or institutional websites....Access to the papers will be via ScienceDirect or if researchers have a strong knowledge of an academic's or institutional website." (PS: I've heard the latter claim before, but it's mistaken. If the eprint is on the author's personal web site, then Google and other search engines will index it. If it's in the author's institutional respository, then it will be part of an interoperable network and can be discovered by researchers who didn't even know that the repository existed. In addition, Yahoo and Google are starting to index institutional repositories.) Australia wants to make govt-funded research more accessible
The presentations from the conference, Changing Research Practices in the Digital Information and Communication Environment (Canberra, June 1, 2004) are now online. Quoting from the June 5 press release on the conference: "The Government believes that it has a major policy interest in improving the accessibility of research. It is therefore decided to pursue the agendas of making research quality more apparent, and research results more accessible, in parallel....In terms of accessibility of research the NSCF [National Scholarly Communications Forum] constituents will work with international partners on a number of fronts especially to develop the concept of 'public funding, public knowledge, public access'."
Rockefeller University Press (RUP), working with HighWire Press, has completed the backfile conversion and release of all 3 of RUP's journals. The latest increment is an 80 year expansion of the free backfiles of Journal of Experimental Medicine.
Journal of Experimental Medicine, Fulltext v1+ (1896+) 6 month moving wall; Print ISSN: 0022-1007; Online ISSN: 1540-9538
Journal of Cell Biology, Fulltext v1+ (1955+) 6 month moving wall; Print ISSN: 0022-1007; Online ISSN: 1540-9538
Journal of General Physiology, Fulltext v1+ (1918+) 6 month moving wall; Print ISSN: 0022-1295; Online ISSN: 1540-7748
Stephen Pincock, Tool allows open-access search, The Scientist, June 7, 2004. Excerpt: "Sweden's Lund University said on Thursday (June 3) that it had launched a new online facility that allows users to search for and retrieve articles from open-access (OA) journals. The development is an extension of the university's Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), which aims to promote the use and impact of journals that do not charge users to access articles. At present, 276 of the 1100 journals listed on the directory are searchable by article. About 80 of those are in the medicine, biology, and life sciences categories....Lotte Jorgensen, project coordinator for the DOAJ, said the new article level search functionality creates an incentive for owners of OA journals to submit article level data to the DOAJ in order to further increase the visibility, reputation and impact of their journals." Update. If you found one of my statements in Pincock's article inflammatory, then see my elaboration. Computerworld has named MIT and Sapient Corp. two of the finalists for the 2004 Computerworld 21St Century Achievement Award in the category of Education and Academia. (There are four other finalists in the category.) MIT and Sapient are being honored for their work on MIT's OpenCourseWare Project, which provides open access to MIT course content for users around the world. MIT and Sapient were nominated for the award by Bill Gates.
California Law Review permits postprint archiving
Last November, Dan Hunter of the Wharton School wrote an open letter to the California Law Review (CLR) asking it to reconsider its OA archiving policy. As a result, CLR did reconsider its policy and then, in late March, changed it. Here's an excerpt from the new policy, which is a one-year experiment for next year's issues: "CLR's contract will still require authors to remove working drafts from SSRN upon publication in the California Law Review. However, upon publication, CLR will also provide authors with .pdfs of their articles in their final worded forms and give authors the right to post these .pdfs on SSRN. The .pdfs may remain up indefinitely, so long as they and SSRN's search engines remain free and accessible to the general public." SSRN is the Social Science Research Network, the OA repository of choice for law professors. Thanks to Dan for his good work and kudos to CLR for adopting this helpful policy. (PS: CLR now offers its authors an opportunity that most other law reviews do not. That's a good reason for CLR authors to take advantage of it and for other law reviews to follow suit.) Cross-border defamation suit threatens academic freedom
Donna Hughes is a University of Rhode Island (URI) expert on international sex trafficking in women and children. URI recently removed two of her articles on this subject from the URI web server when a London law firm threatened to sue her for defaming an unnamed UK man and unnamed UK woman whom Hughes had described as traffickers. The articles are still available through the journals that originally published them, National Review Online (Fall 2002) and Vital Speeches of the Day (January 2003). For more details, see Robin Wilson, Professor Says U. of Rhode Island Wants to Censor Her Research Instead of Defending It in Court, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 7, 2004 (accessible only to subscribers). Excerpt: Frank Annunziato, Executive Director of the URI chapter of the American Association of University Professors, "said the case should be a wake-up call to academics who post articles online. With journals printed in the United States, he said, authors are protected by the First Amendment. But that may not be the case for articles published online and downloaded in other countries, where judges have allowed foreigners to pursue lawsuits against American citizens and institutions in courts where the First Amendment does not apply. 'Professors think that we have the First Amendment here and that that's a defense against defamation,' he said. 'But in the Internet world, that may not count.' " (PS: Annunziato is right. In the US, because authors are protected by the First Amendment, defamation plaintiffs must prove that defamatory statements are false. In the UK, in part because there is no First Amendment, defamatory statements are presumed false and the burden is on the defendant to prove them true.) (PS: Offline publications also reach other jurisdictions with lower protections for freedom of speech, so this is not a problem that only affects online publications. But it does affect online publications and the problem won't go away until the rules about national jurisdiction over online speech (especially defamation and hate speech) are not only settled, but settled in a way that doesn't permit cross-border censorship and reduce the worldwide standard to the standard of the least-free countries.) Ingenta's accommodation of OA sources
Barbara Quint, Ingenta Beta Tests New Interface, Information Today, June 7, 2004. Ingenta's new interface, IngentaConnect, will offer more reference linking from indexed articles to full-text articles inside and outside the Ingenta collection. When Quint asked Geoffrey Bilder, Ingenta's CTO, whether Ingenta would offer links to OA articles, Bilder answered yes, "if they came from other major aggregators or sources, such as PubMed or BioMed Central." Bilder also said that Ingenta is willing to offer data conversion, secure hosting, or other services to OA journals and repositories. (PS: This confirms and updates what I heard from Ingenta CEO Mark Rowse when I interviewed him in August 2002.)
As we know, Google is now indexing Ingenta ejournals. Since February, the experiment has grown from indexing metadata to indexing full-text, and from a small number of journals to all but those that "choose to opt out". Have any Ingenta journals chosen to opt out? Just the eight journals from E. Schweizerbart Science Publishers. (PS: Can anyone explain why Schweizerbart decided to opt out? Google only provides free searching and therefore enhanced visibility. Searchers can only click through to full-text if they are subscribers or pay a pay-per-view fee.)
SLA session on publishing and archiving
At the SLA Annual Conference in Nashville, the Physics, Astronomy,and Math Division co-sponsored a session, Publisher/Libarian Archiving Initiatives on June 6. Vicky Reich of Stanford and director of the LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) project, explained the background and progress of their work which has created software and protocols to enable libraries to cache digital juornal content. The project, Reich explained, was motivating by the fleeting nature of that content and in particular restrictive license agreements that do not guarantee subscribers perpetual access and prevent libraries from fulfilling their "memory organization role." She described how the LOCKSS software and protocls work in conjunction with a system of redundant PCs at participating institutions. More than 50 publishers and 100 libraries arE participating in the project. The decreasing costs of data storage works in the participants' favor, Reich pointed out. While the emphasis is on libaries' licensed and freely-available journal content, LOCKSS is extending into other realms, namely, a project collaborating with federal depository libraries called
LOCKSS Docs and a project to preserve state newspapers in California.
Terry Hulbert of the Institute of Physics (IoP,) a participating publisher in LOCKSS, described his Institute's "experiment" with the program. So far IoP has opened one publication, Journal of Turbulence, which is an all-electronic journal dating from 2000. Currently, IoP is licensing its archives (dating from 1874) to subscribers either annually or in perpetuity. Their main concerns with LOCKSS consist of uncertainty about maintaining revenues from their archival subscription model and wanting assurance that unatuhorized users will not access the LOCKSS cache, Hulbert explained.
The librarian's view was presented by David Stern of Yale University. While Stern maintained that LOCKSS works and tthat the "right players," "logical partners" (including Yale) are involved, he questioned if there are enough institutions participating yet and if the model can work for all parties. He alerted the audience to issues of administrative costs, migration to new technologies, potential conflicts with copyright, among other questions. Should the model expand tto include grey literature, local institutional materials, course materials, Stern asked. Shuold institutions become full financial participants or should there be a scale for limited participation and support? The "real costs of archiving" need to be addressed, Stern noted, remarking that "self-archiving is not reliable archiving," limiting one's ability for search and retrieval. Finally, LOCKSS points to "more than storage and delivery," and includesissues of "navigation and filtering," and must include a collaboration between commercial and non-profit organizations, Stern asserted. More on the new Elsevier policy on postprint archiving
Robin Peek, Elsevier Allows Open Access Self-Archiving, Information Today, June 7, 2004. Excerpt: "In a move that has stunned both the publishing community and the academic world, major journal publisher Elsevier is going to permit Open Access self-archiving for almost all of its journal titles. Under the new policy it will permit authors to self-archive their materials. This move will not change Elsevier's subscription model for funding." Peek quotes several OA proponents (Stevan Harnad, Deborah Cockerill, me), showing that there is some disagreement about whether this is a large or small step toward OA.
New JIME on educational semantic web
The current issue of the Journal of Interactive Media in Education is devoted to the semantic web in education. The Ohio Library and Information Network (OhioLINK) has struck an interesting deal with the Public Library of Science. For every faculty member in the 84 member institutions, OhioLINK will pay half the article processing fee charged by PLoS journals. Only six of the 84 colleges and universities are already institutional members of PLoS. From the June 2 press release: "Helen Doyle, PLoS director of development and strategic alliances, said the OhioLINK program would 'help to catalyze a widespread transition to open- access publishing in science and medicine.' Doyle told the LJ Academic Newswire that OhioLINK and PLoS had discussed extensively the possibility of making OhioLINK an institutional member, but settled instead on the current arrangement." Report on the Second Nordic Conference on Scholarly Communication
The June 7 issue of ScieCom Info is devoted to the Second Nordic Conference on Scholarly Communication (Lund, April 26-28, 2004). The entire issue is in English, not the usual Swedish. Here are the articles: More on Elsevier's business position
Jeremy Warner, Outlook: Reed Elsevier, Independent, June 4, 2004. Excerpt: "As market leader with approximately 17 per cent of the global market, Mr [Crispin] Davies should be sitting pretty, yet he's under attack as never before from those who want to see scientific and medical research freely available to all over the internet. The Commons' Science and Technology Committee promises next month to produce a report on the issue....Yesterday, Reed appeared to make a small concession to the 'free to air' lobby. In future, all research that has been approved for publication in one of Reed's journals can be displayed free prior to publication in edited form on the researcher's or institution's website. Researchers can already display their work on their own websites after publication, so the move hardly represents a decisive break in the dam. Even so, it's a concession which plainly weakens the business model to some degree. First publication rights have been conceded. It is indicative of the pressure Reed is under from its contributors that it has felt obliged to go even this far." (PS: Warner then gives some off-base commentary on OA. For example, even if the Wellcome Trust is right that OA journals would cost much less to produce than Elsevier journals of comparable quality, "it's hard to see what the benefit to the scientific community might be." Given this, it's hard to trust his commentary on anything else.) More on Elsevier's new policy on OA archiving
Saeed Shah, Reed Elsevier gives in on free research, Independent, June 4, 2004. Excerpt: "Reed Elsevier has allowed academics who submit articles for publication in its science journals to make the research available for free on their personal or institutional websites. The move was seen as a major concession to the 'open access' lobby - a movement among academics and university librarians that argues that published research should be made available to all scientists free....Arie Jongejan, the chief executive of the science & technology division of Elsevier, insisted the company's policy on publication was already much more 'liberal' than opponents suggested. He said the latest concession was 'what our critics and authors want'." Further evidence on the representation of developing world interests in academic journals
One of the charges levelled against the author-pays model of open access is that it will make it more difficult for authors from poorer countries to get their research published. David Spurgeon, in a paper in this week's BMJ (BMJ 2004;328:1337) highlights a more significant problem: the under representation of '3rd world' health issues in the leading medical journals. This suggests that the chief issue facing poorer countries is not page charges, or even access to journals, but in getting funding for research on their principal health challenges.
DOAJ launches article-level searching
Today Lund University launched Phase 2 of the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). From the press release: "The new version of DOAJ now includes records at article level and a search functionality allowing users to search articles in potentially all Open Access Journals. The directory now contains information about more than 1100 open access journals, i.e. quality controlled scientific and scholarly electronic journals that are freely available on the web. As of today 270 of the 1100 journals are searchable on article level and both numbers are growing. Researchers can now search almost 46,000 articles through the Directory of Open Access Journals and be sure to get access to the articles." (PS: This is a major step forward in making OA content more discoverable, retrievable, visible, and useful. Kudos to Lotte Jorgensen, Lars Bjørnshauge, and everyone else on the DOAJ team at Lund!) Ramifications of OFAC policy for co-authors from embargoed countries
Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, U.S. Trade Policy Creates Confusion Over Co-Authorship, Science 304(1576), 1422 (4 June 2004) (access restricted to subscribers.) Bhattacharjee explores the implications of the U.S. Treasury Department's OFAC ruling that appears to prohibit co-authorship between U.S. authors and their counterparts in countries with which the U.S. has a trade embargo. An Iranian scientist's plight is described in detail, particularly how the release of his data may be hindered by this ruling. Discussion of the legitimacy of OFAC's jurisdiction over the issue and OFAC's potential willingness to consider individual cases ensues. OA session @ ALA Annual, Orlando
OPEN ACCESS PUBLISHING MODELS: FLORIDA ENTOMOLOGIST AND THE BERKELEY ONLINE PRESS
STS Publisher/Vendor Relations Discussion Group
Orange County Convention Center, Rm. 206C
Saturday June 26, 2004, 9:30 - 11:00 a.m.
Speakers:
Dr. Thomas Walker, Professor Emeritus of Entomology, University of Florida, Gainesville, on OA initiatives of the Florida Entomological Society and the Entomological Society of America.
Dr. Aaron Edlin, Professor, Boalt Hall Law School and Department of Economics at U.C. Berkeley and co-founder, Berkeley Electronic Press on "The Berkeley Electronic Press Publishing Model."
Interesting looking session. Florida Entomologist is a pioneering (v1, 1917), peer-reviewed entomology journal, which has pushed aggressively into the online world. It was the first OA title in BioOne. They've digitize and released the entire backfile for Open Access from their primary website.
Berkeley Electronic Press (BE Press) has a complete suite of digital publishing tools and services. Although the economics and law journal sets, and a single title in chemical engineering, are subscription-based, BE Press recently launched an OA conference proceedings service, Engineering Conferences International. Canadian funder discriminates against OA journals
The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning (IRRODL) is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal published by Athabasca University in Canada. It recently applied for funds from the Canadian Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), but was turned down on the ground that it does not have at least 200 paying subscribers. IRRODL explained that it was an open-access journal, that it was peer-reviewed, that it had at least 6,800 regular readers, and that it was indexed in the DOAJ, but SSHRC was unmoved. IRRODL has been forced to launch an emergency appeal for 200 supporters to pay a token subscription fee of $10/year. "In the spirit of an Open Access journal your subscription will NOT provide any additional services to those available to unpaid subscribers. However, you will be demonstrating to SSRCH and other potential funders that you value IRRODL and support its decision to continue to provide free access to the journal...." (Thanks to James Farmer.) (PS: In the age of open access, it is inaccurate and harmful to use subscriber tallies as a measure of excellence or fund-worthiness. I invite SSHRC to change its policy or explain it.) More on the new Elsevier policy
Lucy Sherriff, Reed says yes to science on the Web, The Register, June 3, 2004. A very misleading account of Elsevier's new policy. (1) This is not a "u-turn from [Elsevier's] previous position". Elsevier formerly allowed postprint archiving with case-by-case permission. Now it gives blanket permission in advance (for certain kinds of postprint archiving). (2) Elsevier does not limit authors to posting "plain-text" versions of their articles. (3) Elsevier does not limit authors to post only to their own personal web sites. (4) Elsevier does not require that there "be no external links to the re-published text". More on Google's outreach to online scholarship
Paula Hane, The Latest on Factiva, Ingenta, Google, and More, Information Today, June 3, 2004. Excerpt: "Of greater interest and importance to researchers were Google's recently announced partnerships with traditional information industry companies, which continue its initiatives to include scholarly content....Ingenta joins organizations like IEEE, OCLC, and others that now have content indexed by Google....Extenza, another U.K. company, announced that Google is indexing the e-journal content (in either Adobe PDF or full-text HTML) held on its Extenza e-Publishing Services journal hosting platform....CrossRef, a 300-member publisher trade association that provides a cross-publisher reference-linking service, announced a pilot project called CrossRef Search that enables users to search the full text of scholarly journal articles, conference proceedings, and other sources from nine leading publishers. (See Barbara Quint's NewsBreak.) Not surprisingly, Google is supplying the search technologies, while CrossRef is providing the reference links to publisher Web sites....All of these publisher and vendor deals with Google raise the sticky issue of searching subsets versus the entire mass of indexed Web content. Will users of Google's general Web search engine really benefit? Will the scholarly articles rise high enough in search results to actually be found, or will they be buried in obscurity many thousands of results down? Placement is certainly an issue. Wouldn't it be more productive to search within slices of content?" Judith Blake, Bio-ontologies—fast and furious, Nature Biotechnology 22, 773 - 774 (2004) (access restricted to subscribers.) Excerpt: "Beyond dictionaries or thesauri, bio-ontologies formally represent relationships between defined biological concepts, such that the vocabularies can be used both by humans and by computers to exchange and explore information. The pace with which bio-ontologies are implemented and adopted by the scientific research community will have a significant impact on the ability to integrate, explore and infer knowledge from scientific data. This development will also influence the evolution of traditional scientific publishing towards reports that are seamlessly linked to online informatics resources."
Computer security implications for OA
Dov Greenbaum et al, Computer security in academia—a potential roadblock to distributed annotation of the human genome, Nature Biotechnology 22, 771 - 772 (2004). (Access restricted to subscribers.) Greenbaum and colleagues discuss how threats to computer security such as viruses, worms, hacks and the like increase the cost of computer maintenance to institutions and imperil openness and interoperability for researchers wishing to access each other's data. "Free and broad dissemination of ideas between independent laboratories and the public is the hallmark of research," they write. Apart from dire scenarios of overstretched IT departments, and increasing restrictions that may result, the authors suggest "creating a community-wide system of identity management and authentication (perhaps via Shibboleth). This would greatly help in the interoperation of tools within a federated database framework." More on Google and CrossRef Search
Péter Jascó reviews the CrossRef Search Pilot in his column, Péter's Digital Reference Shelf, Thomson Gale, June 2004. Excerpt: "Make no mistake, I like Google....I appreciate how smart and nibble it is with 3.5 billion Web pages of mostly unstructured text with no metadata, no tagged and marked fields to identify author, publication date, subject and the likes. But I am not impressed by its...modest ability in handling a collection of about 2.5 million scholarly articles that are endowed with consistently used rich metadata. These articles were presented to Google (whose spider could not crawl these pages) on a silver platter by nine well-known publishers for the CrossRef Search Pilot project." (Thanks to Gary Price.) OA recommendation to the EU 7th Framework Programme
Lilian van der Vaart, Quo Vadis Academia? A Triptych, April 22, 2004. A position paper inspired by Holland's DARE Project written for the EU 7th Framework Programme. Excerpt: "Although creation and communication of new knowledge are equally important, the latter process has been relatively underexposed in the scientific research domain. Universities and research institutes rarely have an articulated scientific communications policy, let alone a matching strategy and infrastructure. Yet, the appropriate technology is available. It is time realise an irreversible breakthrough in the flow of research results to education, to professionals, to society and, not the least, to the scientists themselves. A concerted effort at EU level could give the decisive push. Recommended R&D; and related policy priotities for Europe in FP7:...[The EU should adopt] a European Research Charter...The Research Charter should define generic guidelines for open access to (publicly financed) research results and include recommendations to European Governments and the research community." More on Elsevier's new postprint archiving policy
Elsevier has issued a press release (June 3) describing the policy-change. Excerpt: "Now, no permission is required for authors to revise and widely post the final version of the text, provided that the posting contains a link to the home page of the journal in which the article was published, and that the posting is not used for commercial purposes -- such as systematic distribution or creating links for commercial customers to articles." The restriction on commercial reuse is new since the Karen Hunter email that first announced the policy-change. The press release includes a link to the "interesting comments" in my article about the new policy in yesterday's issue of SOAN. (Thanks to David Prosser.)
Open access to drug trial research
Barry Meier, New York Times June 3rd, highlights an open access related issue in medical research - that of non-publication of potentially important research (free password required for online edition) about the effectiveness of drugs. In this instance the drug is Paxil, and the specific issue is the non-publication of unfavourable results: More on Elsevier's new policy on postprint archiving
Richard Wray, Reed allows academics free web access, The Guardian, June 3, 2004. Excerpt: "The move could make the 200,000 articles Reed Elsevier publishes every year freely available on the internet. Karen Hunter, Elsevier senior vice-president, strategy, explained: 'There was a desire in the market from many authors and many institutions to have an official record of their institution's intellectual output. We have listened and we have responded.'...Deborah Cockerill, assistant publisher at rival open access publisher BioMed Central, said Reed's move 'merely scratches the surface of the fundamental problem with the traditional publishing model which is based on controlling access. They are offering a series of limited forms of access - so partial compared with open access so that it won't threaten the subscription model.' "
David Aldous, editor of the forthcoming OA journal, Probability Surveys, has created a website with the initial call for papers, the editorial board, and a running count of submitted and proposed papers. Probability Surveys will be hosted by Project Euclid and will be co-sponsored by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and the Bernoulli Society. Institutional repositories from a library perspective
H. Frank Cervone, The Repository Adventure, Library Journal, June 1, 2004. Excerpt: "The digital repository genesis has been short, beginning in late 2000 when the UK's University of Southampton released a software package called EPrints. Since then, the movement to establish digital repositories has gained momentum....Implementing an institutional repository raises complex questions about organizational resources and strategies, as well as questions about roles and responsibilities. After all, many institutional repository projects are motivated by the desire to change the current model of scholarly communication. This change, if successful, would place the responsibility for publishing material on scholarly institutions, taking the commercial publishers largely out of the picture." (PS: One quick correction. Repositories do not perform peer review, and those who want to use them to change the current model of scholarly communication do not want to bypass or abolish peer review. The goal of those supporting repositories is to complement peer-review providers, like journals, not to replace them.) June issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter
I just mailed the June issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter. In addition to the usual round-up of news and bibliography from the past month, it takes a close look at Elsevier's new policy to permit postprint archiving, the primacy of authors in the campaign for open access, and a promising new method for providing open access retroactively to important research articles.
Update. One hour later, I'm already getting automated responses from a handful of servers around the world telling me that they've blocked the issue for one reason or another. Here's a first: the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal blocked it because it triggered the "MONEYSCAM" spam profile. If you are a subscriber and did not receive your copy by email today, then first read it online (all issues are archived online), and second, talk to your ISP about adding SOAN to its spam whitelist.
Eric Lease Morgan's DOAJI Search (first blogged here May 5) was just named nice web site of the month by the June issue of Internet Resources Newsletter. Congratulations Eric! OA to images and image metadata
The W3photo Project is creating photo archives with OA images and OA image metadata. The OA metadata will include semantic-web information designed to make the images "more available to the visually impaired". AKM Adam, Openness, Publication, and Scholarship, AKMA's Random Thoughts, May 28, 2004. AKMA summarizes an ongoing discussion from several theology scholarship blogs on "open source" scholarship. The inaugural issue of BiblioAcid (March 2004) was devoted to La 'crise des périodiques'. It contains the following articles, the first three of which are translations from English originals. More on the value of society publications
Dana Roth, Electrochemical Journals, AIP's Scitation, Cost-Effectiveness, the (sci-tech) Library Question, May 28, 2004. Roth shows how the Electrochemical Society publishes journals of value. First, the ES has joined the AIP's Scitation platform so that its content may be searched, linked and accessed (with subscription) with that of other scientific societies. Second, Roth presents a table of cost-effectiveness comparisons which reflect favorably on the ES compared with commercial journals in the same discipline. He goes on to say that scientific society publishers are not part of the journal cost problem, but then expresses a dim view of OA publishing: OA to critical texts in the history of science
Klaus Graf, Open Access und Edition, Archivalia, May 31, 2004. An online version of Graf's upcoming presentation at the conference Vom Nutzen des Edierens (Vienna, June 3-5, 2004). Graf defends OA not only for journal articles, but also for cultural property [Kulturgut] in archives, libraries, and museums, and to handwritten original manuscripts and scholarly editions of the primary texts of science. (In German.)
More on Google's embrace of OA scholarship
Robin Peek, Googling DSpace, Information Today, June 2004 (not online). I wish I could give you an excerpt but I have no access myself. More on removing OA info from govt web sites for security reasons
Sarita Chourey, Feds map risks of GIS: Guidelines seek balance between security, access, Federal Computer Week, May 31, 2004. Excerpt: "Rand Corp. officials say that open access to geospatial data does not pose much of a national security risk. A recent report from the company found that much of the information available is not sufficiently unique, critical or current to be of much use to terrorists....The library community supports open access to government documents. But Linda Zellmer, who heads Indiana University's geology library and served on the working group, said she is 'not sure it's sensible to have some of this information out.'...However, Zellmer said that some information has been public for such a long time that potential attackers already possess it. 'I don't think taking it down is going to do much good,' she added."
SPARC Europe director also responds to Elsevier CEO
David Prosser, Academic libraries back open access publishing system, Financial Times, May 29, 2004 (accessible only to subscribers). A letter to the editor in response to Arie Jongejan's anti-OA article published on Wednesday. Excerpt: "Arie Jongejan ("The formula works, so don't tinker with it", May 26) describes the current system of scientific publishing as "stable, scaleable and affordable". Unfortunately, his customers do not agree....More researchers are turning to open access journals, more publishers are converting their existing journals to open access (including the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences), and funding bodies around the world see the importance of open access to ensure the widest possible dissemination of the research they fund." |
The open access movement: Formerly called FOS News.
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