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Presentations from Harvard publishing conference The presentations from the Harvard conference, Publishing in the New Millennium (Cambridge, November 9, 2007), are now online. All of them are OA-relates. (Thanks to Graham Steele.) Free online math and physics books John Baez has collected links to a good number of free online textbooks in mathematics and physics. (Thanks to Entertaining Research.) OA journal starts using CC licenses The University of Edinburgh's OA journal, SCRIPT-ed ("A Journal of Law, Technology & Society") has started using CC-BY-NC-ND licenses. OA newsletter converts to OA blog The CAC Review from the Caribbean Amerindian Centrelink has converted from an OA newsletter to an OA blog. The Annals of Improbable Research has converted to OA. (Thanks to Wired News.) From the announcement:
Comment. At the risk of being a wet blanket, let me point out AIR has to be serious about its business model even if it's not serious about anything else. It's making new issues available in four forms: priced print, priced hi-res PDF, free low-res PDF, and free HTML. I don't know whether this system will pay the bills, and AIR probably doesn't either. But I'm fascinated by it. It lets AIR provide free online access to 100% of its new articles without embargoes, abridgments, or publication fees. Is there any reason why "serious" journals shouldn't experiment with the same model?
Profile of the SSPAL learning object repository Lucia Antonelli, Il repository istituzionale SSPAL.doc, a presentation delivered at Verso la circolazione dei saperi pubblici (Rome, December 11, 2007). In Italian but with this English-language abstract:
Campaign against DRM on ebooks and ebook readers Joshua Gay, Don't let DRM get between you and a good book, Defective by Design, December 20, 2007. (Thanks to LIS News.) Excerpt:
Here are a few more notes from the celebrations around the web. (Thanks to Bora Zivkovic for several of these.) From Georgia Harper at the Texas Digital Library:
From Brandon Keim at Wired News:
From Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb:
From Barbara Kirsop at the Electronic Publishing Trust for Development:
From Mark Patterson at the PLoS blog:
From Fernando Pereira at Earning My Turns:
From Rich at The New Freedom:
From Kevin Smith at Scholarly Communications @ Duke:
From Blake Stacey at Science After Sunclipse:
Also see the shorter comments by Richard Akerman, BTurtle, Jason Buberel, Martin Fenner, Barbara Fister, Robert Gehring, Greg Laden, Mark Leggott, Heather Morrison, Lorena O'English, Open Helix, Neel Smith, Andrew Staroscik, and David Weinberger.
New OA project from Carl Malamud, Brewster Kahle, and the Boston Public Library John Markoff, Documents of Library in Boston to Go on Web, New York Times, December 27, 2007. Excerpt:
Also see the Public.Resource.Org press release. Update. Also see W. David Gardner's story in Information Week. Update. Also see the editorial in the Boston Globe supporting the project. Egyptian law would put ancient monuments under copyright Egypt 'to copyright antiquities', BBC News, December 25, 2007. Excerpt:
Thanks to Eric Kansa for the alert and for this comment:
Comment. I see the need for funds to protect Egyptian antiquities. But there's a category mistake in seeking those funds through the retroactive extension of copyright to objects that have already entered the public domain. I've called that piracy against the public domain, and I have to use that description here as well. The problem in Egypt is not that copying harms the original creators, or that those creators need an artificial monopoly, but that the cost of preserving those antiquities is not adequately borne by those who benefit from them. That kind of cost-spreading is normally done through taxes, and the real problem here is that Egypt cannot tax non-Egyptians. (I'm conceding that all of us benefit from the existence of Egyptian antiquities, a point that some might not concede.) The problem is hard and Egypt cannot solve it alone. But I'd rather see nations use local taxes to create a worldwide fund for objects of worldwide interest than to see nations use copyright law as a general vehicle for fund-raising. The policy principle at stake here is that the public domain should grow every year and never shrink. This means that I'd rather pay such a new antiquities tax than to be subject to the extended copyright law, even though I'd personally never copy Egyptian monuments or have to pay royalties. The new issue of Information Services and Use (vol. 27, no. 4, 2007) is now online. The issue is devoted to presentations from last year's Academic Publishing in Europe conference (Berlin, January 23-24, 2007). The articles are TA, and in most cases, not even abstracts are free online, at least so far. Here are the OA-related articles:
Update. The full-texts of all the articles in this issue are free online in a single large PDF. (Thanks to Gavin Baker.) Here are some notes from the celebration around the web: From John Gordon at Gordon's Notes:
From Stevan Harnad at Open Access Archivangelism:
From Glyn Moody at Open...:
From Peter Murray-Rust on A Scientist and the Web:
Also see the shorter comments by Charles Bailey, Jonathan Eisen, Klaus Graf, Leslie Johnston, Paula Kaufman, Oliver Obst, Dorothea Salo, and the discussion thread about it on Slashdot.
Public Access Mandate Made Law, a press release from the Alliance for Taxpayer Access, December 26, 2007. Excerpt:
This morning President Bush signed the omnibus spending bill requiring the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) to mandate OA for NIH-funded research. Here's the language that just became law:
For the major steps along the way, and my evaluation of the bill, see my three newsletter articles from August, November, and December. Here's a fast recap: In July 2007 (for the second time) the House of Representatives adopted an appropriations bill requiring an OA mandate at the NIH. In October 2007 (for the first time) the Senate adopted the same language. In November, President Bush vetoed the bill for reasons unrelated to the NIH provision, and the House failed to muster enough votes to override the veto. Congress responded by combining many of the vetoed appropriations into one omnibus bill, cutting spending down to levels that the President could accept, and retaining the NIH provision without modification. Thanks to all supporters of open access in Congress and the Executive branch, including the NIH itself. Thanks to SPARC and the Alliance for Taxpayer Access for their energetic and effective work with policy-makers. Thanks to Heather Joseph for her masterful and untiring leadership of both organizations. Thanks to all of you who wrote to your Representatives and Senators to support public access for publicly-funded research. Thanks, Santa! More later, you can bet. New free journal on evolution outreach Evolution: Education and Outreach is a new peer-reviewed journal from Springer. (Thanks to John Timmer.) Each of its articles is free online, and it doesn't seem to use the Springer Open Choice hybrid model. I'd call it Springer's first full OA journal except that it requires individual request and permission for all "reuse" (no qualifications). By contrast, Springer's hybrid OA articles use CC licenses. Clearly something is wrong: the same "reuse" page incorrectly says that access requires payment ("To purchase or view a PDF of this article, please...select 'add to shopping cart' "), and of course copyright law permits some reuse without permission. The editorial in the inaugural issue says nothing about the journal's access policy. Nature starts depositing chem data in ChemSpider Antony Williams, A Growing Collaboration with Publishers - Nature Initiates Deposition of Spectral Data Onto ChemSpider, ChemSpider blog, December 21, 2007. Excerpt:
New cross-archive search engine and LIS encyclopedia Archivopedia: The online archives encyclopedia, LibSite, December 24, 2007. Excerpt:
Michael Geist, The year in Canadian tech law, A to Z, Toronto Star, December 24, 2007. Excerpt:
More on the variety of access barriers Akobundu Dike Ugah and Michael Okpara, Obstacles to Information Access and Use in Developing Countries, Library Philosophy and Practice 2007. Excerpt:
No more registration requirement for NEJM access Since 2001 the New England Journal of Medicine has provided free online access to its research articles after a six month embargo. But it required users to register. On December 19, it dropped the registration requirement. Another society launches an OA journal In 2008, the Pediatric Cardiology Society of India will launch a peer-reviewed OA journal, the Annals of Pediatric Cardiology (no web site yet), published by Medknow. OA policy from the Flanders Marine Institute The Flanders Marine Institute (Vlaams Instituut voor de Zee, or VLIZ) has adopted a policy to deposit the Institute's research output in its OA repository, the Open Marine Archive (Open Marien Archief, or OMA). OA for improving research metrics Christine Kosmopoulos and Denise Pumain, Citation, Citation, Citation : Bibliometrics, the web and the Social Sciences and Humanities, Cyberego: European Journal of Geography, December 17, 2007.
From the body of the paper:
Rachel Creppy, Archives ouvertes, archives institutionnelles et protocole français, Bulletin des Bibliothèques de France, October 2007. (Thanks to the INIST Libre Accès blog.) An update on OA archiving in France. Because it's a PDF, I can't link to a machine translation. Update. Thanks to Marl�ne Delhaye for letting me know about an HTML edition of the article, which allows me to link to Google's English. (Unfortunately, however, Google's machine translator doesn't work on this article; I'm leaving the link in place in case the problem is only temporary.) Marl�ne also points to this English-language blurb from the table of contents: After presenting the European context of the Open Archives Initiative, the article looks at the current state of the French project in terms of signatories, approach, objectives, strategic axes, current works on communication issues, metadata structure, interoperability and ongoing archiving, the involvement of university institutions, and issues to be resolved. The Danish Library Agency is joining CERN's SCOAP3 project (Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics). From the December 20 announcement:
OA for maximizing research impact Stevan Harnad, Harvesting the Fruits of EU Research, Opening Scientific Communication, December 24, 2007. In French and English. Excerpt:
Happy holidays! Another reason for a Bush signature The same spending bill directing the NIH to mandate OA for NIH-funded research also directs the Environmental Protection Agency to re-open its libraries after a two-year frenzy of agency-led destruction. For details, see the press release from the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. The Protocol Freedom Information Foundation (PFIF) is a new, non-profit organization devoted to OA for software protocols. It recently persuaded Microsoft to open up the Windows server protocols in order support full interoperability with Samba, the FOSS suite of networking tools for Unix and Linux machines. For details, see Serdar Yegulalp's article in Information Week. Santa helps those who help themselves Stevan Harnad, From Father Christmas to all the little boys and girls wishing for Open Access, Open Access Archivangelism, December 23, 2007. Excerpt:
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