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Are OA repositories adequate for long-term preservation? Peter B. Hirtle, Copyright Keeps Open Archives and Digital Preservation Separate, RLG DigiNews, April 15, 2007. Sadly, this is the last installment of the FAQ column in the final issue of DigiNews. Excerpt:
More on green OA without paying for gold OA Stevan Harnad, OA or More-Pay? Open Access Archivangelism, April 18, 2007.
Opening up Google scans of public-domain govt documents Raizel, An Open Letter to Google, William Patry, and Google's Library Partners, No Attention, April 13, 2007. (Thanks to Klaus Graf.) Excerpt:
Josiah Ober and three co-authors, Toward Open Access in Ancient Studies: The Princeton-Stanford Working Papers in Classics, Hesperia, 76 (2007) pp. 229-242. (Thanks to Tom Elliott.)
A snag with the Swiss OA mandate Donat Agosti, Urheberrecht als Hindernis f�r die Forschung, NZZ Online, April 20, 2007. Read it in German or Google's English. Here are the two key paragraphs, translated for OAN by Agosti himself:
More on the unmet demand for access in India Abhishek, Towards Open Access For Scientific Research, Descritics, April 20, 2007. Excerpt:
Two on OA from the March WZB-Mitteilungen In the March 2007 issue of WZB-Mitteilungen there are two OA-related articles. (Thanks to Eric Steinhauer via Klaus Graf.)
OA repositories under Australian copyright law The Open Access to Knowledge (OAK) Law project (OAK Law) at Queensland University of Technology has released A Guide to Developing Open Access Through Your Digital Repository. From the April 18 announcement:
More on OA for preservation and vice versa The Research Information Network (RIN) has released a new report, Stewardship of digital research data: a framework of principles and guidelines, April 2007. Excerpt from the full-text:
PS: As far as I can tell, the report endorses OA both as a goal for preservation projects and as one of the means. The high cost of not making public information OA Michael Cross, Bad maps are key factor in farming fiasco, The Guardian, April 19, 2007. Excerpt:
Most of the presentations from the CERN workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication (OAI5) are now online. All of them are OA-related. Scholarly journals between the past and future On April 21-22, 2006, the Swedish Royal Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities hosted a seminar, Scholarly journals between the past and the future. Now the presentations have been published as a book:
The editor's advice: "don't buy stock in commercial journal publishing companies." PS: I'd link to the seminar and book but I can't find URLs for either one. Congratulations to Open University OpenLearn, the open courseware project at Open University, has won a major award. From the OU press release:
More on the evolving OA policy from the APA/AIA The Task Force on Electronic Publication for the American Philological Association (APA) and the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) has issued its Final Report. The report is undated but appears to have been released March 31, 2007. Also see the separate appendix. (Thanks to Karla Hahn.) From the Executive Summary:
From the body of the report:
The recommendations in the report have been submitted to the APA and AIA boards but have not yet been adopted. For background on the APA/AIA deliberations, see my blog post from December 23, 2006. Evaluating the OA journals in different fields Prof. R.K. Shukla's library science students at Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) in India have been evaluating OA journals in different fields. So far they have written studies of the OA journals in chemistry, engineering, LIS, medicine, and social sciences. All the studies are now themselves OA through the IGNOU repository.
Europe needs a green OA lobbying organization Euroscience, which represents 2,300 working scientists in 40 European countries, has launched a new blog dedicated to OA, Opening scientific communication. It's a group blog and welcomes new contributors. The inaugural post is by Stevan Harnad, Green OA Self-Archiving Needs a Lobbying Organisation, April 19, 2007. Excerpt:
OpenDOAR now has an open API for useful and creative mash-ups. From yesterday's announcement:
PS: For background, see my blog post from March 21, 2007. The future for journal publishers Charlie Rapple has blogged some notes on a talk by John Cox (unclear when or where --probably the UKSG meeting in Warwick). Excerpt:
Comment. OA is a kind of access, not a kind of business model. It's not only compatible with many different business models, but it's already supported by many different business models. However, Cox is otherwise right --if I may paraphrase him this way-- that the future for publishers lies in adding value to OA content. OA is not going away and the OA percentage of peer-reviewed journal literature will only keep growing. Some publishers will offer OA themselves and recover their costs from sources other than readers. Others will charge readers for access to enhanced versions of the OA literature. Some of these enhancements will themselves be OA, but some will be unavailable gratis and worth paying for. For those publishers who want to charge for access, as opposed to another kind of service, the new struggle will be to stay ahead of the creeping gift economy that will find ways to make each new enhancement available to end users free of charge. Update. Also see Rapple's notes on Sally Morris' talk at the same conference. The transformation of scholarship from print to digital Douglas Brown, Scientific Communication and the Dematerialization of Scholarship, ProQuest CSA, 2007. (Thanks to ResourceShelf.)
Bentham Science aims to be largest OA publisher, and soon Si�n Harris, Bentham announces OA growth strategy, Research Information, April/May 2007. Excerpt:
April/May Research Information The April/May issue of Research Information is now online. Here are the OA-related articles:
Matthew Cockerill, OA creates new opportunities, Research Information, April/May 2007. Excerpt:
Communicating with repository managers OpenDOAR has announced an email distribution service. From today's announcement:
Storage and tools for OA economics data The Open Knowledge Foundation has released Open Economics version 0.4. From today's announcement:
On the BioMed Central blog, Matt Cockerill previews the BMC consultation workshop at Medical Libraries Association 2007 (Philadelphia, May 18-23, 2007). Excerpt:
The March issue of SCRIPT-ed is devoted building a knowledge commons by unlocking intellectual property in Australia. From Graham Greenleaf's editorial:
John Willinsky and Ranjini Mendis, Open access on a zero budget: a case study of Postcolonial Text, Information Research, April 2007. This is #3 in IR's series of case studies in open access publishing. Abstract:
Update on Sweden's OpenAccess.se project Co-Action has written a short report on last week's meeting of the OpenAccess.se project (Stockholm, April 12-13, 2007). In its entirety:
Progress report on OA in the Nordic countries Turid Hedlund and Ingegerd Rabow, Open Access in the Nordic Countries - a State of the Art Report, Nordbib, February 28, 2007. (Thanks to Co-Action.) Excerpt:
Presentation on data sharing in archaeology ArchaeoInformatics.org has released a screencast presentation on data sharing in archaeology. From the Alexandria Archive Institute blurb:
Digital Libraries group discusses OA issues with the EC Europe's Digital Library experts set to focus on copyright today, a press release from the European Commission, April 18, 2007. Excerpt:
PS: That's all I have on today's meeting or its OA agenda. If anyone has more, I'd love to hear it and, if permitted, publicize it. Increased citation impact for BioMed Central journals, BMC blog, April 17, 2007.
Filling the Harvard institutional repository [Stuart] Shieber, Why Don�t Scholars Provide Open Access to Their Articles? Harvard Interactive Media Group, April 17, 2007. Blurb for a public talk to be given at Harvard today:
More on libraries as OA journal publishers DSA has blogged some notes on the panel discussion, Trying the Gold Road on a Shoestring Budget: Open Access Publishing with PKP's Open Journal System, at CNI's Spring 2007 Task Force Meeting (Phoenix, April 16-17, 2007). Excerpt:
OA podcasts from non-OA journals Charles W. Bailey Jr. has collected some links for journals offering OA podcasts.
P�ter Jacs� reviewed Science.gov 4.0 in his column for Thomson Gale, March 2007. (Thanks to ResourceShelf.) Excerpt:
Open Medicine launched today, but already the web site is overwhelmed with traffic. Give it a few hours and try again. While you're waiting, read some of the voluminous press coverage. Update. I finally got in. Here's an excerpt from James Maskalyk's editorial in the inaugural issue:
Also see these two articles from the Analysis and Comment section:
Christina Pikas has blogged some notes on R. James King's presentation at Computers in Libraries 2007 (Arlington, Virginia, April 16-18, 2007). Excerpt:
More on the launch of Open Medicine Helen Branswell, New open-access medical journal, offshoot of CMAJ firing fight, is launched, CBC News, April 17, 2007. Excerpt:
The CERN workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication (OAI5) starts tomorrow in Geneva and runs through Friday. For those who can't attend, the presentations will be webcast. From CERN's announcement earlier today:
Lee C. Van Orsdel and Kathleen Born, Serial Wars, Library Journal, April 15, 2007. Excerpt:
Also see the annual Periodicals Price Survey data at the end of the article. Comment. This is an excellent picture of where OA stands today. If you have colleagues who want to know what's been happening and only have time for one article, give them this URL. Accelerating and widening scientific debate: blogs v. open-review journals Carl Zimmer, When Scientists Go All Bloggy, ScienceBlogs, April 17, 2007. Excerpt:
What are we learning about IRs? Tom Wilson has blogged some notes on the panel discussion, Institutional Repositories: What Are We Learning? at CNI's Spring 2007 Task Force Meeting (Phoenix, April 16-17, 2007). Excerpt:
Lisa Ennis has written a review of John Willinsky's book (The Access Principle, MIT Press, 2005, print edition, OA edition), forthcoming from the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. Thanks to William Walsh for the alert and, since I don't have access, for this excerpt:
Duplicate provision of priced resources Lanny Arvan has blogged some thoughts on the November 2006 ARCL report, Changing Roles of Academic and Research Libraries. Excerpt:
Embargo the OA, if necessary, but not the repository deposit Stevan Harnad, Don't Make Deposit Timing Policy Conditional On Publisher Embargo Policies, Open Access Archivangelism, April 17, 2007. Excerpt:
Journal prices rarely correlate with impact or size Sonya White and Claire Creaser, Trends in Scholarly Journal Prices, 2001-2006, LISU Occasional Paper #37, Oxford University Press, March 2007. From the Executive Summary:
Also see the Oxford press release, which emphasizes the results for Oxford journals. Danish environmental journal converts to OA The Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS) has shifted from TA to OA for its journal, the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland Bulletin. GEUS is a research institute within the Danish Ministry of the Environment and its Bulletin publishes in English. (Thanks to Soren Bertil Fabricius Dorch.) New online database to help fight infectious diseases, a press release from WHO, April 16, 2007. Excerpt:
Google just upgraded Open Access News, without my consent, from Old Blogger to New Blogger. In the process, it introduced a slew of garbage characters into old posts, apparently corresponding to smart quotes, m-hyphens, and accented characters. In Explorer they show up as square boxes and in Firefox as black diamonds with question marks. If I have to fix these manually, I'll never get around to it (I have 10,700+ posts). I expect other post-transition glitches and apologize in advance for the poor service.
Update. Another glitch: the permalinks for each new post double up the item number. Until I can fix this, users will have to delete one copy before the link will work as intended. For example,
Update. I just fixed the garbage-character problem. Many thanks to Dorothea Salo for the solution. Update. I just fixed the double-ID problem as well, and again thank Dorothea for the solution.
Rufus Pollock, v0.4 of Open Shakespeare Released, Open Knowledge Foundation Weblog, April 16, 2007. Excerpt:
Society publishers build federated search engine Barbara Quint, Sci-Tech Societies Unite to Create Scitopia.org Search Portal, NewsBreaks, April 16, 2007. Excerpt:
Comment. It looks like some societies are thinking that if they make their old articles easier to find, then they can generate extra revenue from access fees. That may be true. But I hope they also consider that if they make their old articles OA and easier to read, then they can generate extra citations. Of course even those who pay for access may cite the articles they read. So this is not a simple trade-off between revenue and citations. But it is a trade-off between a small bump in paying readers, with a proportionally small bump in citations, and a large bump in non-paying readers, with a proportionally large bump in citations. A few other ways to frame the issue: Which would generate more revenue, charging access fees for old articles or harnessing a larger impact factor to increase submissions and subscriptions? How much should publishers spend to make articles easier to find without making them easier to retrieve? If they're going to pave the path to a locked door, could they increase the return on their investment by unlocking the door and letting customers in to see, use, and tell others about the value to be found there?
OA articles from Nature on climate change Nature is providing OA to selected articles on climate change. OA collection from Science on the Macaque genome Science Magazine is providing OA to its special collection on the Macaque Genome. (Thanks to Francis Ouellette.) Gavin Yamey, a senior editor at PLoS Medicine, recently gave two talks on OA at Harvard. From his description at the PLoS blog:
The case for open data in science Peter Murray-Rust, Open Data in Science, abstract of a presentation to be given at XTech 2007 (Paris, May 15-18, 2007). Excerpt:
Publisher Q&A about CC licenses The Creative Commons Publishers Association is "a small group that meets semi-regularly to discuss questions about CC licensing and to establish best practices for publishers and others using Creative Commons� legal tools." The CCPA home page (a wiki) has the minutes from the last meeting (February 21, 2007), which included some very useful questions about CC licenses and answers by Eric Steuer, Creative Director at Creative Commons. Excerpt:
Brewster Kahle on OA to museum content Geoff Crane has blogged some notes on Brewster Kahle's plenary address at Museums and the Web 2007 (San Francisco, April 11-14, 2007). Excerpt:
The library at Technische Universiteit Delft has launched an Open Access Wiki (in English). From Maria Heijne's introduction:
Law reviews with OA companions Environmental Law, the OA law review published by the Lewis & Clark Law School, now has an OA companion, Environmental Law Online. Thanks to Michel-Adrien Sheppard for the tip and for pointing to BoleyBlogs, the legal research blog of the Lewis & Clark Law School Boley Law Library, which lists other law reviews (most non-OA) with OA companions:
Seth Dobson, a postdoc in anthropology at Dartmouth, is self-archiving his publications to the Dartmouth institutional repository.
Kritike is a new peer-reviewed OA journal of philosophy published by the University of Santo Tomas in the Philippines. |