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Rebalancing fair use and anti-circumvention Pamela Samuelson, A Reverse Notice and Takedown Regime to Enable Public Interest Uses of Technically Protected Copyrighted Works, a one-hour MIT World webcast of a talk recorded on November 6, 2007. (Thanks to Gary Price.) From the blurb:
Clinical knowledge: from access to action, The Lancet, editorial, March 8, 2008. (Thanks to Dave Chokshi.) Free registration is required for access to the full text.
Update. See also my comments at gavinbaker.com. Update. Also see the comments from Lancet readers on this editorial. OA is socially responsible research
Stian Haklev, A �Fair Trade� logo for academic research?, Random Stuff that Matters, March 7, 2008.
... I have come up with a few [ethical] points that I would like to commit myself to, and which I think are important and decent in terms of doing [anthropological] research in developing countries. Limitations and exceptions for international copyright
P. Bernt Hugenholtz and Ruth L. Okediji, Conceiving and International Instrument on Limitations and Exceptions to Copyright, a report sponsored by the Open Society Institute, March 6, 2008.
Comment. Copyright limitations and exceptions (such as fair use) are not necessary for OA. But limitations and exceptions facilitate access and re-use of non-OA materials in appropriate contexts, particularly (for our purposes) research and education. Closed journals are data silos
David Wiley, On fully distributing the social network, Iterating Toward Openness, March 6, 2008.
... Facebook�s approach is a classic old-fashioned business model propped up by creating artificial scarcity where none actually exists. It�s much like the problems with the academic publishing businesses right now. The journal publishers want me to come up with a great research idea, go find funding for the work, do the work, write up the work, and then completely sign over all the rights to my work to them - so that I have to pay a license fee to use my own writing with my own students in my own classroom. Facebook wants me to have meet lots of people, make friends with many of them, spend my time connecting the dots between myself and my friends online, and label our relationships, so that Facebook can tell me I don�t have permission to use my own work. Springer, Elsevier, and Facebook� just another couple of data silos. ...Comment. See this post for another comparison of Facebook to OA. OA dictionary file for chemistry
Open Source Chemistry Dictionary is a dictionary file of chemistry terms, apparently released on February 8. It includes instructions for installing the file on Microsoft Word or OpenOffice.org. The file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License.
Allan Scherlen and Matthew Robinson, Open Access to Criminal Justice Scholarship: A Matter of Social Justice, Journal of Criminal Justice Education, March 2008. Abstract:
The paper argues that criminal justice scholarship disseminated through the traditional journal subscription model is not consistent with social justice. Adoption of "open access" principles in publishing benefits both authors and readers through broader and more egalitarian dissemination of criminal justice literature. Moreover, when viewed in light of social justice theory, open access is a more just method of scholarly communication. After providing a brief outline of the history and basic aspects of open access, the paper uses the framework of the social justice theories of John Rawls and David Miller to argue why open access is more just than traditional subscription models of publishing and why criminal justice scholars and their associations must consider the importance of supporting open access initiatives and promoting the dissemination of scholarship as widely as possible if they are concerned about attaining justice for criminal justice scholarly literature. Why IRs are important for smaller institutions
Allan Scherlen, Institutional Repositories: A Good Idea for North Carolina, North Carolina Libraries, Fall/Winter 2007. Abstract:
Librarians at universities in North Carolina are beginning to consider whether to establish electronic repositories where faculty and students can deposit copies of their scholarship for preservation and world-wide access. This article addresses a number of questions and concerns that arise, especially for librarians at smaller institutions, as they consider implementing an institutional repository (IR) program. Does a given institution have enough scholarly content to warrant building an IR? What does an IR provide that is not already available from publishers and database providers? Why would anyone search an IR? Is an IR too costly for a small institution with a limited budget to set up and maintain? The author argues that while building an IR collection requires a significant commitment in staff resources, the outcome of making the collective scholarship of North Carolina open access through IRs will be immensely beneficial to scholars, hosting institutions, students, and citizens of North Carolina and beyond. Major book on OA and German copyright Rainer Kuhlen, Erfolgreiches Scheitern - eine Götterdämmerung des Urheberrechts? [Successful failure - a Götterdämmerung of copyright?] Verlag Werner Hülsbusch, 2008. (Thanks to Klaus Graf.) A new 644 page book, published in a priced/print edition, an OA edition in PDF (2.61 MB), and an OA edition in HTML (still under construction). See especially:
PS: Kuhlen holds the UNESCO Chair of Communications at the University of Konstanz. For more background, see my past posts on him and his organization, Aktionsbündnis - Urheberrecht für Bildung und Wissenschaft [Coalition for Action - Copyright for Education and Research]. The book, BTW, is published under two different CC licenses: the international version of the CC-BY license and the German version of the CC-BY-NC-SA license. Richard Fyffe and William C. Welburn, ETDs, scholarly communication, and campus collaboration: Opportunities for libraries, C&RL News, March 2008. Excerpt:
PS: Also see my own argument for OA to ETDs (in SOAN for July 2006). ACS blocks use of industry-standard chemical numbers in Wikipedia Antony Williams reports that Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS, a division of the American Chemical Society, ACS) will not allow the industry-standard but proprietary CAS Registry Numbers to organize the growing body of chemical information on Wikipedia. Excerpt:
Also see Peter Murray-Rust's first comment:
And PMR's second comment:
Update. Also see Glyn Moody's comment, The World's Leading Anti-Scientific Society. Update. Also see the follow-up posts from Cameron Neylon and Antony Williams on the specific problem of shifting from the closed CAS numbers to some open alternative. Slow progress under U of Zurich's OA mandate Klaus Graf has done a new review of the OA mandate at the University of Zurich. When he first reviewed its progress last year (March 2007), he found that the compliance rate was very low. In his new review, he finds that only 252 documents were deposited in ZORA, the UZ repository, during 2007, and only 25 so far in 2008. By contrast, the U of Freiburg repository added about 1,100 documents without a mandate. Read his new review in the original German or Google's English. OA mandate at the U of Tasmania The University of Tasmania is preparing to implement an OA mandate recommended by its Research College Board. (Thanks to Arthur Sale.) Yesterday Jo Laybourn-Parry, the UT Pro Vice-Chancellor for Research, sent this message to the UT community:
Comment. Kudos to all involved at UT. The UT School of Computing has had its own OA mandate since at least August 2006. The new university-wide mandate would be Australia's third, after mandates at the Queensland U of Technology (January 2004) and Charles Sturt University (circa January 2008). More on the February DFG-DINI conference Ulrich Herb, Vernetzung tut not: Open Access 2.0? Telepolis, March 8, 2008. A report on the DFG-DINI conference, Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Informationslandschaft in Deutschland: Chancen und Strategien beim Aufbau vernetzter Repositorien (Berlin, February 26-27, 2008). Read the German original or Google's English.
American U. of Rome launches IR
The American University of Rome has opened an institutional repository, as announced yesterday (short version, long version).
Acta Crystallographica E converts to OA
According to a post yesterday by Peter Murray-Rust, Acta Crystallographica Section E: Structure Reports Online has converted to OA. The journal is published by the International Union of Crystallography and is peer-reviewed, with monthly issues. Apparently the journal previously offered hybrid OA, as do several other IUCr journals. The publication fee is $150, as reported here; waivers are available for authors from developing countries, and discounts are available for authors with an institutional subscription to Acta Crystallographica C. Articles will be published under the Creative Commons Attribution License, and authors do not transfer copyright to the journal.
I haven't seen any statement from the journal or publisher about the conversion, but we'll add them here is they surface later. Wall Street Journal on OA: access barriers are "bad for capitalism" Daniel Akst, Information Liberation, Wall Street Journal, March 7, 2008. Excerpt:
Microsoft to digitize Princeton seminary books
Princeton Theological Seminary and Microsoft yesterday announced a partnership to digitize the school's public domain library holdings. The digital editions will be OA through Microsoft's Live Search Books service. The collection includes "religious texts from the early history of printing, editions of John Calvin and John Knox, writings of the Puritans, and hymn verses of Isaac Watts." See the announcement from Microsoft or Princeton.
Microsoft will give the Seminary digital copies of all the materials and allow them to be shared with noncommercial institutions and nonprofit organizations ... FWF strengthens its OA policy from a request to a requirement Austria's Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung (Fund to Promote Scientific Research, or FWF) has strengthened its OA policy. (Thanks to the Informationsplattform Open Access and Daniel Mietchen.) The older policy, adopted in October 2006, applied only to project leaders and merely requested OA for FWF-funded research. The new policy applies to all employees in FWF-funded research projects and requires OA. FWF will grant exemptions only when compliance would be unlawful --which may be whenever the publisher does not allow OA archiving. Like other funder policies, this one is strictly about green OA. But FWF also supports gold OA, or OA journals. It encourages grantees to publish in OA journals and allows them to use grant funds to pay publication fees at fee-based OA journals. Read the new FWF policy in German or Google's English. Also read the March 6 press release in German or Google's English. Jan Velterop leaves Springer for KnewCo Jan Velterop is leaving his position as Open Access Director at Springer to become the CEO of KnewCo. From Springer's announcement yesterday:
KnewCo is the company behind the OA WikiProfessional project, which has already launched WikiProteins. For some background, see this February 2007 Nature article on the project and my blogged excerpt. From the KnewCo mission page:
Comment. Jan was one of the framers of the Budapest Open Access Initiative, the first publisher of BioMed Central, and the first Open Access Director at Springer --or for that matter, at any major, predominantly TA publisher. He's a pioneer of OA and will take that seasoned perspective to KnewCo. I wish him well.
State of open bibliographic data
Rufus Pollock, Open Bibliographic Data: The State of Play, Open Knowledge Foundation Weblog, March 6, 2008.
See the post for the list. OA for improving reference service
Steve Lawson, Open Access and the reference librarian, See Also..., March 4, 2008.
Report from Open Access Collections workshop
The February 2008 newsletter of the Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories has a report on the Open Access Collections: Workshop on the challenges and opportunities of open access publishing for Australian universities (held February 14, 2008 in Brisbane).
See also previous OAN posts on presentations and notes from the conference. New OA journal on tropical conservation
Tropical Conservation Science is a new peer-reviewed OA journal publishing "research relating to conservation of tropical forests and of other tropical ecosystems". The inaugural issue was released in March 2008. See the March 3 press release.
The journal is published by Mongabay.com, an environmental science news site, and will be published quarterly. Submissions are accepted in English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German and Chinese; submissions in a language other than English will be published alongside an author-supplied English translation. The submission guidelines ask authors to agree to the Creative Common Attribution License, but I don't see the license tagged on the first issue. (Thanks to Bio-Medicine.) Parkinsons genome data added to NIH database
Genome-wide association study on Parkinson's disease finds public home at NIH, press release, March 4, 2008.
See also past OAN posts on dbGaP. Update. See also Jim Till's comments. On OA for publicly-funded research in history
Tom Scheinfeldt, Federal Funding for the Humanities, Found History, March 4, 2008.
... [F]ederal funding allows�and increasingly demands�us to give all of our resources away at no cost. While our society is getting increasingly closer to eliminating the first digital divide, where network access was determined by demography, we are nevertheless seeing a second digital divide, where many of the best sources of networked information are available only by paid subscription. Small school districts, home schoolers, small businesses, and ordinary taxpayers without a university or corporate affiliation usually cannot afford access to important information resources like LexisNexis and ProQuest. By freeing us from the burdens of cost recovery that private information providers face and private foundations increasingly impose, federal funding helps us provide pertinent, high quality, open access information resources that reach not only the well heeled and well connected, but ordinary Americans. ... OA repositories for scientific data
Peter Murray-Rust, Repositories for Scientific Data (at OR08), A Scientist and the Web, March 4, 2008. An abstract of a forthcoming keynote address at Open Repositories 2008 (April 1-4, 2008, Southampton).
Leaving your literary estate to the public domain
In the U.S., copyright on works of individual authorship (as opposed to corporate authorship; includes joint authorship by more than one individual) lasts for 70 years after the author's death. In some other jurisdictions, it lasts for life + 50. This copyright, if not opened such as by a Creative Commons license, will act as a barrier to the use rights which form the BBB definition of OA. That's a long period to wait for OA. Plus, the author's death makes it harder to locate the rightsholder (who inherited the copyright), making it more difficult to secure permissions and increasing the likelihood the author's work will become orphaned.
This page has been circulating around the Web in recent days (apparently since February 26 or later). It depicts a sticker which an individual can apply to her ID card, in the manner of an organ donor sticker, indicating the individual wishes her copyrights to be released to the public domain upon her death.
OA collection of Audubon illustrations
The University of Pittsburgh library on March 3 released an OA collection of bird illustrations by John James Audubon. Audubon is the noted naturalist for whom the Audubon Society is named. The illustrations are from Birds of America and Ornithological Biography. (Thanks to Wired Campus.)
Google to expand OA book digitization
Jeffrey R. Young, Google Plans to Expand Book-Scanning Partnerships, Wired Campus blog, March 4, 2008.
The news from Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president for search products and user experience: Google will expand its Book Search project, which has scanned more than a million books to date with partner libraries and other institutions. The post is short on details, but there may be more in the podcast. 3 PLoS journals move to Topaz platform
At some point since February 26, PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS Genetics and PLoS Pathogens -- OA journals published by the Public Library of Science -- began their move to the Topaz software platform, as announced here by Mark Patterson. PLoS ONE and PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases already use the Topaz platform.
As announced yesterday, they're still working out some software troubles with the new platform, so you may encounter errors if you visit the sites at this time. WIPO Committee on Development meeting in Geneva
The World Intellectual Property Organization's Committee on Development and Intellectual Property is meeting in Geneva from March 3-7, 2008.
WIPO is a UN agency which administers major treaties regarding international copyright and related policies, and therefore somewhat of a policy-making body for member states. In addition to member states, numerous NGOs are accredited to WIPO as observers, including OA proponents such as the Library Copyright Alliance, the Open Knowledge Foundation, and Electronic Information for Librairies. This is the first meeting of the Development Committee, created to oversee implementation of WIPO's new Development Agenda (i.e., to explicitly acknowledge and promote the goal of development through WIPO's policies and activities). The committee will discuss how to implement a list of 45 proposals, agreed upon in 2007. Topics include access to knowledge. For more information, see coverage at Intellectual Property Watch and by Knowledge Ecology International. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has posted the list of proposals, with proposals to be considered for "immediate" implementation highlighted in yellow. Update. See also past OAN posts on the Development Agenda. Toolkit for authors, researchers, and repository staff
On February 28, VERSIONS (Versions of Eprints � a user Requirements Study and Investigation Of the Need for Standards) released its toolkit for authors, researchers, and repository staff. Among its "top hints":
On the variance in Hindawi's publication charges
Heather Morrison, Hindawi Article Processing Charges: Range, Median / Mode, Average, The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics, March 2, 2008. Of 102 journals by OA publisher Hindawi, processing fees range from free (3 journals) to �1,000, with a median and mode of �400 and a mean of �476.
Less than 10% of OA psychology journals charge a publication fee
Heather Morrison, Less than 10% of Open Access journals in psychology charge a publication fee , The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics, March 2, 2008. Out of 84 psychology journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals, only 8 charge a publication fee.
For more on no-fee journals, see:
Heather Morrison, The Access Gap in British Columbia, The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics, March 1, 2008.
Abstract: This post illustrates the gap in access when we rely on subscriptions, a gap that is huge even in a have province like British Columbia, in a wealthy country like Canada. A researcher who does not see the costs of the subscriptions, may never see the gap. A student, while at a research university, has ready access to tens of thousands of scholarly journals, backed up by a document delivery department that can fill any remaining gaps. A student who graduates and moves to a smaller town or rural area will still have better access than many of the people in the world, thanks to BC's excellent public library system; however, this is still less than 5% of what the alumnus had access to as a student. A small public library cannot begin to dream of providing an equivalent service to the university, with much fewer staff and a much greater gap to fill.See a reaction post by Ryan Deschamps, Does a Fish Know It�s Wet? : Access to Scholarly Journals in Public Libraries, The Other Librarian, March 3, 2008.
New version of Charles Bailey's e-publishing bibliography
On March 3, Charles Bailey announced Version 71 of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing
Bibliography. See the announcement for a description of changes.
OA database for structural biology
Proteopedia is a new OA database for "making structural biology clearer for chemists and biologists by linking textual content to 3D structures". (Thanks to Peter Murray-Rust.)
Book prospectus from John Willinsky
John Willinsky, Could Locke Still Be the Key? Part I, Slaw, March 2, 2008. Willinsky is the author of The Access Principle and director of the Public Knowledge Project.
Feb/March issue of Research Information available
The February/March 2008 issue of Research Information is now available. OA-related articles include:
Integrating institutional and funder mandates
Stevan Harnad, How To Integrate University and Funder Open Access Mandates, Open Access Archivangelism, March 2, 2008.
SUMMARY: Research funder open-access mandates (such as NIH's) and university open-access mandates (such as Harvard's) are complementary. There is a simple way to integrate them to make them synergistic and mutually reinforcing: University of Bergen drafting an OA policy
Kjerstin Gjengedal, Harvard makes Open Access compulsory, P� H�yden, March 3, 2008. In light of recent move by Harvard, Norway's University of Bergen is considering an OA policy:
... Vice-Chancellor Sigmund Gr�nmo maintains that [University of Bergen] wishes to increase the use of open access, and informs that a case is being prepared which will be presented to the board shortly. ...
Open Knowledge Definition in Spanish and Catalan
The Open Knowledge Foundation today announced that its Open Knowledge Definition has been translated into Spanish and Catalan.
Interview on OA to health statistics
An interview with Sally Stansfield - Who owns the information? Who has the power?, Bulletin of the World Health Organization, March 2008. Stansfield is executive secretary of the Health Metrics Network.
The February 2008 report from the Research Papers in Economics project, released today, includes the news that its IDEAS service moved to a new server with a faster Internet connection. The post also reports a significant increase in traffic over the previous February, and other milestones passed.
Creative Commons today launched Planet Creative Commons to aggregate posts from the official CC blog, blogs of national jurisdictions, and CC community members. Announcement here.
Lessons from an OA book experiment
The main lesson, apparently: give readers the book in a useful format, not a crippled one. The experiment in question is a free download of Neil Gaiman's novel American Gods.
See commentary at Free Government Information and Boing Boing, both dated March 2. See also Gaiman's comments on why free reading is important (to fiction, but echoing Heather Morrison's comments about aiming for obscurity). I'll be on the road Monday-Thursday with few opportunities for blogging or email. But Gavin will be on the job and I'll start to catch up myself on Friday. I just mailed the March issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter. This issue takes a close look at the new OA mandate adopted by a unanimous vote of Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences. The round-up section briefly notes 109 OA developments from February. Update. I'm having trouble getting the email edition out to all subscribers, and unfortunately I may have to leave town before I can solve this problem. If I do, remember that the web edition is online and unaffected. |