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The case for distributed over central OA archiving Stevan Harnad, Central versus Distributed Archives, Open Access Archivangelism, December 16, 2006. Excerpt:
If OA harms publishers, libraries will pick up the slack Dorothea Salo, Why I Am The Enemy, Caveat Lector, December 15, 2006. Excerpt:
Update (December 17, 2006). See Jan Velterop's comment on Dorothea's post. The December issue of D-Lib Magazine is now online. Here are the OA-related articles:
Wiki-based guide to developing OA digital libraries From a Sukhdev Singh post yesterday on diglib_india (thanks to Chris Leonard):
Five Italian rectors sign the Berlin Declaration
The rectors of five Italian universities signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge on December 6: Università degli studi di Ferrara, Università degli studi di Lecce, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore - Milano, Università Vita-Salute s. Raffaele - Milano, and Università degli studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia.
The incentives to share and collaborate Francis Heylighen, Why is Open Access Development so Successful? Stigmergic organization and the economics of information, an ECCO Working Paper 2006-06 forthcoming in B. Lutterbeck, M. Baerwolff, and R. A. Gehring (eds.), Open Source Jahrbuch 2007, Lehmanns Media, 2007. Self-archived December 14, 2006. (Thanks to vsevcosmos.)
PS: This article is about projects like open-source coding and Wikipedia that are intrinsically more collaborative than most peer-reviewed research articles. But how how far does Heylighen's analysis carry over? Steve Hitchcock, EPrints version 3 unwrapped, EPrints Insiders, December 14, 2006. Excerpt:
Another update on Oxford's OA experiments Richard Gedye, Open about open access: We share preliminary findings from our open access experiments, Oxford Journals Update, Issue 2, 2006 (scroll to p. 3). Excerpt:
PS: Thanks to William Walsh for alerting me to this article and for correcting Gedye's use of the misleading term "author pays". Update (1/8/07). Also see Gedye's "Open Access: Walking the Talk," Against the Grain, November 2006. It appears to be another summary of Oxford's OA experiments, but this one is accessible only to subscribers, at least so far. OA before copyright reform or OA through copyright reform? Stevan Harnad, Well-Meaning Supporters of "OA + X" Inadvertently Opposing OA, Open Access Archivangelism, December 14, 2006. Summary: There are many things that are delaying the onset of the optimal and inevitable outcome for research in the online age (100% Open Access). Among them is over-reaching: 100% OA is already within our reach; we need merely grasp it, by mandating self-archiving. But if we insist instead on holding out for something beyond our immediate grasp -- OA + "X" (such as copyright reform, data-archiving, publication reform) -- then we simply keep delaying the optimal and inevitable, gaining next to nothing for our pains. Chris Armbruster hopes the February meeting of the European Commission on Scientific Publishing in the European Research Area: Access, Dissemination and Preservation in the Digital Age will reach for radical copyright reform rather than grasping immediate Open Access by mandating self-archiving. Let us hope this will not turn into yet another meeting that misses the opportunity to reach the optimal and inevitable at last. All other good things will follow, but not it we insist they come first. More on the PRC study of OA archiving and journal subscriptions Stevan Harnad, President-Elect of the Association of American University Presses (AAUP) on Open Access: An Exchange, Open Access Archivangelism, December 13, 2006.
OA portal and repository for South Asian studies Ruprecht-Karls Universit�t Heidelberg has launched Savifa: The Virtual Library of South Asia. Here are some details from an article in today's Telugu Portal:
OA database on joint Indian-Japanese research India and Japan have agreed to collaborate on research in many fields and to track the research in an OA database. Today the DOAJ listed its 2,500th peer-reviewed open-access journal. For more details, see the announcement.
Hosting and tools for OA geodata Thomas Claburn, Mapping the Future of Open Source Data, Information Week, November 27, 2006. (Thanks to Richard Akerman.) Excerpt:
Google Library Project is two years old Today is the second anniversary of the Google Library Project and ResourceShelf has put together a useful timeline of its major milestones and challenges over the past two years. Social Science Open Access Repository Two German research centers have agreed to launch a Social Science Open Access Repository (SSOAR). SSOAR will be funded by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft or DFG) and run by the Social Science Information Center (Informationszentrum Sozialwissenschaften) of the larger Society for Social Science Infrastructure Facilities (Gesellschaft Sozialwissenschaftlicher Infrastruktureinrichtungen or GESIS), and the Institute for Qualitative Research (Institut f�r Qualitative Forschung) at the Freie Universit�t Berlin (FUB). For more details, see the press release from GESIS (December 13, 2006) or the press release from Center f�r Digitale Systeme at the FUB (November 21, 2006). So far SSOAR doesn't seem to have a web site and all the information I can find is in German. I'll post more when I have more. Linda Hutcheon, Thoughts on digital scholarship in the humanities, a new author interview in the Scholars Speak section of Create Change. Excerpt:
EMBO adopts hybrid model for two journals The EMBO Journal and EMBO reports to accept author-paid open-access articles, a press release from the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO), December 14, 2006. Excerpt:
Comments.
Progress on The European Library Bigger European Digital Library? Tell me more! Euractiv, December 11, 2006. (Thanks to ResourceShelf.) Excerpt:
OCA book scanning at the U of California Mass Digitization: Open Content Alliance and the UC Libraries, CDLINFO Newsletter, December 14, 2006. Excerpt:
Drexel's institutional repository Jay Bhatt and Kevin Martin, E-repository at Drexel University: vision and evolution, a presentation at the IEEE Library Advisory Council Meeting (New York City, October 26-28, 2006). Bhatt is the Information Services Librarian and Martin is the University Archivist at Drexel. Self-archiving justified, regardless of effect on subscriptions Stevan Harnad, Economies of Scale, Open Access Archivangelism, December 13, 2006.
Gold OA scales, green OA doesn't Jan Velterop, Scale and scalability, The Parachute, December 12, 2006. Excerpt:
Also see Stevan Harnad's reply. T. Scott Plutchak, Can You Have It Both Ways? T. Scott, December 12, 2006. Excerpt:
Also see this comment by William Walsh, a librarian at Georgia State University:
The NIH has launched a new OA database on genome wide association studies. From today's announcement:
Synergies between wikis and the OA movement The Wikimedia Foundation is hosting a Wikimedia Open Access chat this Sunday, December 17. From the wiki-based announcement: The open access movement is set to liberate scientific publishing. Science is contingent upon the free exchange of ideas; global communication networks enable it. Yet, in traditional publishing, copyright law is used to impede the distribution of even the most relevant scientific findings. Pioneering open access publishers such as the Public Library of Science and BioMed Central publish their findings under Creative Commons licenses -- specifically, licenses which permit free distribution, modification, and even commercial use. For more connection details, see the rest of the announcement. MIT's new Scholarly Publishing Consultant MIT has hired a Scholarly Publishing Consultant to advise faculty about their OA options. (Thanks to ResourceShelf.) From the announcement on the MIT Libraries News blog:
PS: Another great idea from MIT. Until OA is as familiar as email, every university should have something like this. OA journals in Middle East Studies John Russell, Open Access and Middle East Studies, MELA Notes: The Journal of the Middle East Librarians Association, 79 (2006). (Thanks to Chuck Jones.) A short introduction to OA followed by an annotated list of 12 peer-reviewed, open-access journals in the field of Middle East Studies. "An open access sea change is happening" Bernard Lane, ARC sold on open access to research, The Australian, December 13, 2006. Excerpt:
New OA journal and info portal on health threats The Journal of Global Health Protection is a new OA journal on threats to global health. It has a companion Forum for Global Health Protection, a portal of OA information. From today's announcement:
Free full-text feeds increased feed subscribers and ad revenue John Blossom, Full-Text Feeds Paying Off: Moving Beyond Fear to Profits, Content Blogger, December 11, 2006. Excerpt:
Comment. Digital Inspiration, which ran this experiment, is an OA blog. Because it didn't charge subscriptions, it didn't fear the loss of paying subscribers. It feared reduced click-throughs for the ads on its web site and increased plagiarism. Those are the fears it laid to rest. Peter Murray-Rust, Open Data - what can I do? Simple, legal, viral suggestion, A Scientist and the Web, December 12, 2006. Excerpt:
Lessig's Code version 2.0, in print and OA editions Lawrence Lessig has released Code version 2.0. From his blog announcement:
Profile of John Willinsky and the PKP Heather Morrison, John Willinsky and the Public Knowledge Project, Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics, December 11, 2006. Excerpt:
Yves Miserey, CNRS : le scandale d'une num�risation rat�e, Le Figaro, December 10, 2006. (Thanks to Netbib.) Apparently CNRS spent 32 million Euros on a project to digitize 196 journals for OA, but abandoned the project after two years with nothing to show for it. Read the original French or Google's English. PS: I'll say more when I learn more --preferably from an English-language account. OA mandate at Bharathidasan University R. Krishnamoorthy, Web site on research papers, a hit, The Hindu, December 12, 2006. Excerpt:
Comment. Kudos to everyone at Bharathidasan University involved in the decision to mandate OA to the peer-reviewed research papers written by faculty. This is only the second institutional OA mandate in India (after the National Institute of Technology, Rourkela), and I believe it's only the second time anywhere, after the University of Tasmania School of Computing, that an institution has launched a repository and adopted an enlightened policy to fill it at the same time --an excellent sign that the full message is spreading. Microsoft and OA: Richard Poynder interviews Tony Hey Richard Poynder, A Conversation with Microsoft's Tony Hey, Open and Shut? December 12, 2006. This is another of Richard's wonderfully long, detailed interviews. Even the subset directly on OA is too long to excerpt here. So read the whole thing for Tony Hey's take on data sharing, open source code and licensing, open standards, the need for OA, the need for pragmatism and compromise in advancing OA, what Microsoft has to gain by supporting OA, and Microsoft's role in developing Portable PubMed Central, the NLM DTD, and the Windows version of EPrints. Excerpt:
PS: Another reason to read Richard's original is to get active links. Adobe makes it incredibly difficult to copy linked phrases without dropping the links or even to go back and copy the URLs separately for hand-coding. Open Access and Digital Libraries is a new Yahoo Group launched earlier today by Sukhdev Singh. From Sukhdev's inaugural post,
Complete works of Mozart free online New Mozart Edition online, a press release from the Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum (ISM), December 11, 2006. (Thanks to Glyn Moody.) Excerpt:
Update (December 14, 2006). Mike Carroll reports that the Mozart files are not as free as they appear to be:
Kind words for an honorary librarian Heather Morrison has been writing a series of posts at OA Librarian on notable librarians working for OA. She just made me an honorary librarian in order to fit me into the series. Thanks for your kind words, Heather.
C. Baker and five co-authors, Open exchange of data: the eGY pathway towards capacity building, a presentation at COSPAR 2006 (Beijing, July 16-23, 2006).
I've blogged different articles from the ARL Bimonthly Report 248, October 2006, but I haven't yet blogged the full TOC.
Rebeca Cliffe, Research Data: Emerging From The Shadows? EPS Insights, December 11, 2006 (accessible only to subscribers). Excerpt:
Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom (eds.), Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice, MIT Press, 2006. From MIT's blurb:
Comments
Alma Swan on institutional repositories Alma Swan, The institutional repository: what it can do for your institution and what the institution can do for the repository, a presentation delivered at the ANKOS Workshop 2006 (Istanbul, October 26-27, 2006). The new OA policy from SISSA/IOPP SISSA (Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati) and IoPP (Institute of Physics Publishing) have published a Proposal for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (November 2006). Excerpt:
Comment. This is an interesting new variation. First, it's a hybrid in which the fees are paid by institutions on behalf of all of their authors and all their articles. In that respect it differs from the hybrids we've seen to date in which the fees are charged article by article, each author making an individual choice. Of course it also differs from conventional TA journals in which fees are paid by institutions on behalf of their readers. PLoS and BMC offer institutional memberships, but not in hybrid forms that coexist with subscriptions. Second, it's designed to mesh with the ongoing CERN project to convert all particle physics journals from TA to OA. I commend SISSA and IOPP for working within the constraints of the CERN project, for setting the institutional membership fees so that they're competitive with the subscription prices, and for promising to reduce their subscription prices in proportion to institutional uptake. Distinguishing the AIP and APS positions on OA Stevan Harnad, Don't confuse AIP (publisher) with APS (Learned Society), Open Access Archivangelism, December 10, 2006. Excerpt:
Genevieve J. Knezo, Open Access Publishing and Citation Archives: Background and Controversy, Congressional Research Service, October 10, 2006. (Thanks to Adrian Ho.) Excerpt:
Comment. This report makes no policy recommendations, and only tries to summarize the questions and controversies. I'll say more when I've read more, but it doesn't start well by appearing to confuse OA journals with OA repositories; by asserting that "most open access systems charge authors publication fees" when in fact most do not; and on the first page by introducing the concept of OA by putting an essay by Martin Frank et al. on a par with the Budapest Open Access Initiative. Michael Geist renews call on Canada to mandate OA Michael Geist, Let loose the flow of digital knowledge, Toronto Star, December 11, 2006. Excerpt:
PS: At least three times before (one, two, three), Geist has called on Canada to mandate OA for publicly-funded research. Copyright reform and OA to legal knowledge Ann Bartow, Open Access, Law, Knowledge, Copyrights, Dominance and Subordination, Lewis & Clark Law Review, Winter 2007.
Comment. First, let's distinguish royalty-free legal publications (statutes, judicial opinions, law review articles) from royalty-producing legal publications (indices, treatises, encyclopedias, etc.). The OA movement has always focused on the former, as the low-hanging fruit, even if there are long-term ways to extend it to the latter. It's low-hanging fruit either because it's in the public domain from birth (statutes and opinions) or because the original copyright holders can consent to OA without losing revenue (law review articles). Hence, achieving OA for this category requires no copyright reform. That is, it requires no statutory reform, like compulsory licensing. Moreover, achieving OA for this category would be a significant boon for legal researchers, lawyers and non-lawyers alike. It goes without saying that OA to two categories of literature would be more useful than OA to just one, but that's no objection to the usefulness of achieving OA for the large and primary category that's already within reach.
Access to NASA data for non-scientists K. Ward and D. Herring, NASA Earth Observations (NEO): Moving Data Access Forward for Outreach and Education, a presentation at the American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2006 (San Francisco, December 11-15, 2006).
Virtual conferences to improve access B.W. McGee, Enhancing Scientific Collaboration, Transparency, and Public Access: Utilizing the Second Life Platform to Convene a Scientific Conference in 3-D Virtual Space, a presentation at the American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2006 (San Francisco, December 11-15, 2006). Abstract: Recent studies reveal a general mistrust of science as well as a distorted perception of the scientific method by the public at-large. Concurrently, the number of science undergraduate and graduate students is in decline. By taking advantage of emergent technologies not only for direct public outreach but also to enhance public accessibility to the science process, it may be possible to both begin a reversal of popular scientific misconceptions and to engage a new generation of scientists. The Second Life platform is a 3-D virtual world produced and operated by Linden Research, Inc., a privately owned company instituted to develop new forms of immersive entertainment. Free and downloadable to the public, Second Life offers an imbedded physics engine, streaming audio and video capability, and unlike other "multiplayer" software, the objects and inhabitants of Second Life are entirely designed and created by its users, providing an open-ended experience without the structure of a traditional video game. Already, educational institutions, virtual museums, and real-world businesses are utilizing Second Life for teleconferencing, pre-visualization, and distance education, as well as to conduct traditional business. However, the untapped potential of Second Life lies in its versatility, where the limitations of traditional scientific meeting venues do not exist, and attendees need not be restricted by prohibitive travel costs. It will be shown that the Second Life system enables scientific authors and presenters at a "virtual conference" to display figures and images at full resolution, employ audio-visual content typically not available to conference organizers, and to perform demonstrations or premier three-dimensional renderings of objects, processes, or information. An enhanced presentation like those possible with Second Life would be more engaging to non-scientists, and such an event would be accessible to the general users of Second Life, who could have an unprecedented opportunity to witness an example of scientific collaboration typically reserved for members of a particular field or focus group. With a minimal investment in advertising or promotion both in real and virtual space, the possibility exists for scientific information and interaction to reach a far broader audience through Second Life than with any other currently available means for comparable cost. Providing OA to pre-1975 govt tech reports From a post to the SLA-ENG list (thanks to STLQ):
As part of the pilot project, sample collections have been identified for digitization, one collection (the entire Monograph Series of the National Bureau of Standards) is currently being scanned, an appropriate metadata schema has been agreed upon, and an interface for searching collections is being created. Good news from the Public Knowledge Project (PKP), December 4, 2006:
Here's the Mellon citation:
PS: Several of the other winners have an OA connection: The Internet Archive's Heritrix web crawler; the open-source Moodle course management system; the open-source Sakai course management system; and the WPOPAC online public access catalog. The American Institute of Physics (AIP) has issued a statement spelling out the AIP Position On Open Access & Public Access. See the Fall 2006 issue of Professional Scholarly Publishing Bulletin, p. 3. The statement is dated October 2006.
PS: The same issue of the PSP Bulletin (pp. 4, 8) reprints the September 22 letter from 10 provosts to Senators Cornyn and Lieberman, opposing FRPAA. See my September 22 comments on the letter. Comment. No doubt peer review is added value. It may be added by unpaid editors and referees, but there are transaction costs and they are paid by publishers. On the other side, government OA mandates only apply to research funded by taxpayers. Since publishers and taxpayers both make a contribution to the value of peer-reviewed articles arising from publicly-funded research, what's the best way to split this baby? The current method is a reasonable compromise: a period of exclusivity for the publisher followed by free online access for the public. More, even after the embargo period ends, the existing policies and proposals only mandate access to the author's peer-reviewed manuscript, not to the published edition. Publishers who want to block OA mandates per se, rather than just negotiate the embargo period, are saying that they want no compromise, that the public should get nothing for its investment, and that publishers should control access to research conducted by others, written up by others, and funded by taxpayers. |