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Free online German journals from before 1930 The German Wikisource has put together an excellent list of free online German-language journals whose backfiles start before 1930. (Thanks to Klaus Graf.) Almost open arms for open access Lois Lehman-McKeeman and Shelley Andrews, Open Arms for Open Access: Toxicological Sciences Joins "Oxford Open", Toxicological Sciences, December 2007. An editorial. Only this short fragment is free online, at least so far:
Jan Christian Bryne and eight co-authors, JASPAR, the open access database of transcription factor-binding profiles: new content and tools in the 2008 update, Nucleic Acids Research, November 2007.
Obi L. Griffith and 29 co-authors, ORegAnno: an open-access community-driven resource for regulatory annotation, Nucleic Acids Research, November 2007.
Swedish research libraries join SCOAP3 The Swedish National Library has joined the CERN SCOAP3 project. The SCOAP3 news page explains that the library signed an expression of interest "on behalf of the BIBSAM consortium for Swedish research libraries." Update. Also see the announcement from the National Library of Sweden. It adds these new details:
European Physical Journal C converts to no-fee OA As of November 1, 2007, the European Physical Journal C --one of the eight journals in the EPJ family-- has converted to no-fee OA for all its research articles. For the past year it has been a hybrid OA journal charging a fee for the OA option. EPJ C is published jointly by Springer, EDP Sciences, and Società Italiana di Fisica. From the announcement:
PS: I assume that the opening reference to negotiations with OA funding agencies alludes to the CERN SCOAP3 project. If I'm wrong, I'd like to hear from anyone with better information. National Archives Joins Geospatial One Stop (GOS) Web Portal, a press release from the US National Archives, November 13, 2007. (Thanks to ResourceShelf.) Excerpt:
Spread of institutional repositories in developing countries Susan Veldsman, eIFL Institutional Repositories Setting the Platform for International Co-Operation, EPT blog, November 17, 2007. Excerpt: First from Barbara Kirsop's prefatory note:
Now from Veldsman:
Comment. Kudos to eIFL for organizing this important development. Institutional repositories are an affordable, effective way to provide worldwide open access to the research output of an institution. They are a natural solution any research institution, even the most affluent, but are an urgent solution where money is tight and conventional forms of research visibility are low. Unlike HINARI and related initiatives, which make some research from the North visible in the South, OA (through repositories or journals) is a two-way street and can make research from the South visible in the North. ARL Bimonthly Report on university publishing The ARL Bimonthly Report, no. 252/253 is a Special Double Issue on University Publishing. Though dated June/August 2007, it apparently came out just last week. (Thanks to Charles Bailey.) The links in this TOC point to preprints:
Public.Resource.org has struck again, this time by creating a mirror (or mirror-in-progress) of the whole web site of the US Government Printing Office. PS: Bravo to the tireless Carl Malamud and PRO. Free online access to books and journals for Pakistanis HEC provides online access to 40,000 text books, [Pakistan] Daily Times, November 17, 2007. Excerpt:
Comment. It looks like the government is providing subsidized priced access to the non-Pakistani journals, rather than open access. But I can't tell about the Pakistani journals. Also see the May 2007 announcement of the OA portal for Pakistani journals, and the National Digital Library itself. DOAJ/SPARC Europe seal of approval program An announcement from David Prosser of SPARC Europe (blogged with permission):
Comment. I like this approach. I like the way it's bottom-up rather than top-down, and decentralized rather than centralized. I like the way it focuses on the endorsement and support of respected organizations rather than on the control of word usage. I like the way it will provide new clarity and precision without requiring the agreement of everyone using a certain word or phrase. I expect that it will succeed in making OA journal policies, on average, more consistent and more open. And I like the way it will have that kind of unifying effect while at the same time respecting pluralism through its compatibility with similar programs from other organizations supporting a different standard. I look forward to the details. Stevan Harnad, Publishing Management Consultant: "Open Access Is Research Spam", Open Access Archivangelism, November 15, 2007.
Also see Stevan's follow-up today:
PS: I blogged a substantial excerpt from Esposito's article (not the interview) on November 6, and added a few comments. More on the bill mandating OA at the NIH Bruce Byfield, Open Access bill vetoed, Linux.com, November 16, 2007. This story is not quite up to date, for example, on yesterday's failure by the House to override Bush's veto, but it's worth blogging for the analysis by Matt Cockerill, publisher of BioMed Central. Excerpt:
Update. Byfield has updated his article to mention the House override vote. Digitizing the Dead Sea scrolls Simon Tanner of King's College London will lead a team in digitizing the Dead Sea scrolls. (Thanks to digitizationblog.) From the KCL announcement:
PS: Digitizing the scrolls "for the web" probably means "for free online access" if not full OA. But it might mean "for access by paying customers". Does anyone know which? Creative Commons has released an add-in for OpenOffice. For details, see yesterday's announcement. More notes on the Harvard publishing conference Evie Brown has blogged some notes on the Harvard conference on Publishing in the New Millennium: A Forum on Publishing in the Biosciences (Cambridge, November 9, 2007). Excerpt:
Obama wants greater access to environmental data Barack Obama has released his technology platform. It doesn't expressly call for open access to publicly-funded research, but it seems to presuppose it, at least in some forms in some fields:
Tracey Caldwell, Economists lead EU infonet, Information World Review, November 13, 2007. Excerpt:
OA to Swedish essays written in English University essays from Sweden is an OA collection of English-language essays written by Swedish university students. Apparently "essays" here includes theses and dissertations. (Thanks to antropologi.info.) From the site:
From the about page:
S.B. Ghosh and Anup Kumar Das, Open Access and Institutional Repositories – a developing country perspective: a case study of India, IFLA Journal, 33, 3 (2007). Scroll to p. 229. (Thanks to ResourceShelf.)
Elsevier launches a medical wiki Elsevier has launched WiserWiki, a wiki on medical research aimed at both practicing physicians and lay readers. (Thanks to Graham Steel.) From the site:
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House fails to override Bush veto of bill containing OA mandate for NIH Andrew Taylor, House to Sustain Veto of Health, Ed Bill, Associated Press, November 15, 2007. Excerpt:
Comment. OK, on to Plan B. The OA mandate for the NIH is a small part of a big bill to pay for about one-thirteenth of the federal government. Some version of the appropriation will certainly pass and get the President's signature. You can already see the jockeying between Congressional leaders and the White House about the contours of that version. There are four grounds for optimism:
First batch of open data from the Pleiades project Rufus Pollock, Pleiades: Lots of Ancient Geodata Released! Open Knowledge Foundation Weblog, November 12, 2007. Excerpt:
The November-December issue of Educational Technology is devoted to Opening Educational Resources. The issue isn't yet online, but the journal has allowed authors to post OA copies of their articles online. Here's one: Eve Gray, The Other End of the Telescope: Opening Educational Resources in a South African University, Educational Technology, November-December, 2007.
Update. Here's another OA edition of an article from the same issue: Judith Breck, When Educational Resources Are Open. Update. Here's another: Sarah Whitcher Kansa and Eric C. Kansa, Open Content in Open Context. Update (8/3/08). The full issue is now OA. The November/December issue of D-Lib Magazine is now online. Here are the OA-related articles:
The Online Access to Research in the Environment (OARE) entered Phase 2 on November 6. Details from SciDev.Net:
PS: OARE is not OA, but offers free and discounted access to developing countries. Charles Bailey, Perseus Digital Library Code and Content Now Freely Available, DigitalKoans, November 13, 2007. Excerpt:
PS: Perseus is one of the oldest digital libraries, launching on CDs in 1987 and moving to the internet (where it was free of charge) in 1994. An OA journal spells out its access policy The Python Papers has released a Statement on Open Access. PP is an OA journal devoted to the Python programming language. From the new statement:
Comment. I appreciate this kind of explicitness (and have previously called for it). However, the statement seems to prohibit authors from self-archiving preprints and revised versions of the postprint, even when they make clear that they are not the same as the published edition. That restriction is unnecessary and hard to reconcile with the CC-BY-NC-SA license. Search engine for the spoken word Here's a useful combination: OA audio file of the spoken word + speech recognition software + search engine. Two MIT researchers have made OA lectures much more useful by making them searchable. They've set up a prototype for searching audio lectures within the large collection at MIT's Open Courseware. For details see MIT News. (Thanks to ResourceShelf.) FASEB working for override of Bush veto Bob Grant, Bush vetoes NIH budget increase, The Scientist, November 14, 2007. You know the basic facts. But here's what's new:
Comment. What's new and welcome here is that FASEB is working for the override in order to save the billion dollar budget increase for the NIH. FASEB has opposed a strong OA policy at the NIH in the past (see one, two, three), but clearly believes that it would be a price worth paying for the overall budget increase. Are donated manuscripts taxable income to publishers? Michael Carroll, Tax Problem for Commercial Publishers? Carrollogos, November 14, 2007. Excerpt:
WHO IGWG2 waters down draft OA mandate Manon Anne Ress, Require or Encourage? IGWG text on open access, KEI Policy Blog, November 14, 2007. Excerpt:
Comment. Thanks to Manon and KEI for this alert. I'd like to hear from any readers who might know which national delegations inserted the strong language in the first draft and which wanted to weaken it in the new draft. I'd welcome other, more specific details on the opposition and the procedure going forward. If you send me anything, please let me know whether it is confidential or whether I may make it public. Update. Also see Stevan Harnad's comments. Update. Also see Katherine Nightingale's story in SciDev.Net for November 19, 2007. She doesn't identify the source of the original strong language or the subsequent weakening, but she does quote some apt comments:
Update (11/27/07). Also see the story by Daniel Griffin at the Information World Review blog. "ACS Insider2" (a.k.a. "Miss Phlogiston") reports that the American Chemical Society (ACS) has a plan in case the NIH adopts an OA mandate:
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Most UK museums and libraries not using open licenses Research Reveals More Museums and Libraries Need to Enable Public Use of Online Resources, a press release from Eduserv, November 14, 2007. Excerpt:
PS: For background, see my post on the launch of the survey in July 2007. Update. For the report itself, see the body of the text and the appendices. Updated list of society publishers with OA journals Caroline Sutton and I have posted an updated version of our spreadsheet of society publishers with OA journals. For some background (but not up to date totals) see our article in the November SOAN. Sources for OA editions of public domain books Sean Aune has collected 20+ Places for Public Domain E-Books. (Thanks to LIS News.) 1.8 million pages of federal case law to become freely available, a press release from Public.Resource.Org, November 14, 2007. Excerpt:
Comment. Another victory for the public and the public domain, thanks to Carl Malamud and Public.Resource.org. Kudos to PRO, Fastcase, and all involved. Update. Also see John Markoff's story in the November 14 New York Times. New OA database on material properties The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has launched a new OA database, Material Properties. For detail, see the Chemistry Central blog. New discussion list on "the new politics of knowledge" Citizendium has launched a new discussion list, SharedKnowledge. (Thanks to Klaus Graf.) From the description:
Knowing when you may self-archive Peter Murray-Rust, Communal repositability wiki? A Scientist and the Web, November 13, 2007. Excerpt:
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Mary Page has blogged some notes on Deborah Wiley's talk at Charleston 2007 (Charleston, November 7-10, 2007). Excerpt:
Comment. It's not fair to criticize such a short paraphrase of longer remarks. So I'll be hypothetical: if anyone were inclined to make these claims, I'd have to reply that they were not paying attention. First, there is far more discussion nowadays of practical implementations of OA, including business models, than declarations. Look at any week of my blog archive as an example, or the "round-up" section of any issue of my newsletter. Second, every study of scholar attitudes toward OA shows much less lack of interest than lack of understanding and lack of familiarity with the options. An unsustainable profit model at the expense of researchers Mark Montague, Scientific publishing in need of a fix soon, The California Tech, November 12, 2007. (Thanks to George Porter.) Excerpt:
Update. See the comments by Dana Roth. OA to the research output of Catalonia's PRBB Catalonia's Parc de Recerca Biomèdica de Barcelona (PRBB) is creating a search engine, rather than a repository, for OA editions of its research papers. From yesterday's announcement on PRBB News:
New free online journal on digital conservation E-Conserv@tion is a new free online peer-reviewed OA journal. It calls itself OA, but it requires users to register, and click their agreement with the CC-BY-NC-ND licensing terms, before they are allowed to read any articles. Even then, you cannot download individual articles but only an entire issue in a single PDF. The inaugural issue (October 2007) is now online and includes an article on OA, The Open Access Concept (pp. 14-19). I'd link to it but the journal doesn't support deep links to individual articles. The article presents the results of a survey of attitudes toward OA among conservators. I'd post an excerpt here, but I just ran into one more frustrating limitation: cutting/pasting a paragraph of readable text creates an unreadable mess full of random spaces. Wall Street Journal to become free online Rupert Murdoch is about to remove price barriers to the online edition of the Wall Street Journal. See coverage, for example, here, here, and here. His idea is to make more money from advertising than he now makes from subscriptions. The online WSJ now has about one million subscribers paying $99/year. Note that the New York Times took this step in September 2007, and for the same reason. In the same month, Murdoch began hinting that he would do the same for the WSJ. Also remember that Elsevier is doing very much the same thing with OncologySTAT. Comments
Stevan Harnad, No Need To Keep Waiting For Gold OA, Open Access Archivangelism, November 14, 2007. Excerpt:
Comment. Stevan is right. To summarize: there are at least three ways for authors to avoid fees and still provide OA to their peer-reviewed postprints. (1) At fee-based OA journals, many authors can get a fee subsidy from their funder or employer, and many others can get a fee waiver from the journal. (2) Most OA journals charge no fees in the first place. (3) Green OA or self-archiving charges no fees. Recognition for founder of Dutch e-Depot Royal decoration for founder of KB’s e-Depot, a press release from the Dutch Koninklijke Bibliotheek. Excerpt:
Also see the RAND Europe report on e-Depot published last week (and blogged here just a minute ago). Interview with Christine Borgman Scott Jaschik interviews Christine Borgman in today's issue of Inside Higher Ed. Excerpt:
Comment. I like all of Christine's answers, and just have a quick comment on the first one. It may be true that the benefits of OA for authors are "indirect". (I say "may" because I'm not sure what's more direct than increased visibility, audience, and impact.) But we shouldn't draw the conclusion that the benefits from conventional, TA publication are somehow more direct. Authors are not paid for their journal articles by either kind of publisher. Their rewards in both cases lie in intangible, perhaps indirect, benefits like citation impact, prestige, and career advancement. Whether the OA is gold or green, delivered by an OA journal or by an OA archive after the author publishes in a conventional journal, OA and TA do not differ primarily in the kinds of rewards they bring to authors. Assuming that authors publish in journals of equal quality or prestige, the chief differences are that OA brings these rewards sooner and in greater degree. For details, see Steve Hitchcock's bibliography. Digital preservation with an eye on the rise of OA Stijn Hoorens and four co-authors, Addressing the uncertain future of preserving the past: Towards a robust strategy for digital archiving and preservation, RAND Europe, November 6, 2007. (Thanks to Matt Cockerill.) Research prepared for the Dutch Koninklijke Bibliotheek. To keep my load manageable, I've generally stopped blogging digital preservation news, but this report has a clear OA connection. Excerpt:
See Chapter 3 on Scholarly dissemination and publishing: a complex and dynamic environment (pp. 15-32), especially 3.3, Trends and uncertainties in scholarly dissemination and publishing (pp. 26-32), covering trends, including the rise of OA, that e-Depot is designed to accommodate.
Bush vetoes LHHS appropriations bill The headline says it all, but here's some detail from Jennifer Loven for the Associated Press:
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Update. If you want some language, Charles Bailey has put together a very good message that you may cut/pastea into an email or web form. (Thanks, Charles.) Wiley's Wrox Press uses wiki for new series of free online books Ashley Jones, Publishing in Real Time: Wrox Stays Current with Near-Time, EContent, November 13, 2007. Excerpt:
Australia's plan for access, preservation, and re-use of publicly-funded research data Towards the Australian Data Commons: A proposal for an Australian National Data Service, ANDS Technical Working Group, October 2007. (Thanks to Charles Bailey.) From the Overview:
From the body of the report:
Sundar Raman interviewed me for his show, Open Views, on radio KRUU FM. We did the interview on October 12, 2007, and I don't know when it was broadcast, but the 60 minute podcast is now available for downloading. More on the Global Text Project Andrea Foster, Software Group Gets Online Textbooks to the Developing World, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 16, 2007 (accessible only to subscribers). Excerpt:
Notes on the Harvard publishing forum Kaitlin Thaney has blogged some notes on one of the panels at the Harvard Medical School conference, Publishing in the New Millennium: A Forum on Publishing in the Biosciences (Cambridge, November 9, 2007). Excerpt:
Making the web work for research the way it works for pizza John Wilbanks, Director of Science Commons, has reactivated his blog at Nature Network. The blog subtitle is "Agitating for innovation through open licensing and good technology." He launched the blog in July 2006, but stopped posting the same month until he could "work out the intellectual property aspects of posting [t]here." From his first post since then:
From today's important post on The Research Web:
Sun's high-capacity storage system integrated with OA archiving software Tim Stammers, Sun breaks out Honeycomb, CBR, November 12, 2007. Excerpt:
Google's OpenSocial for scholarly networking Michael J. Hemment, OpenSocial Scholarship, ResearchForward, November 12, 2007. Excerpt:
Educators need access to education research Sandra Porter, Evidence-based teaching, open access, and the digital divide, Discovering Biology in a Digital World, November 12, 2007. Excerpt:
New OA journal of anthropology After Culture is a new peer-reviewed OA journal of anthropology. The inaugural issue is now online. (Thanks to antropologi.info.) PS: For background, see my post from January 2006 in which Matthew Wolf-Meyer proposed this journal. He's now the editor. Waking up from an access nightmare Heather Morrison, Is the Canadian Journal of Anesthesia asleep? Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics, November 11, 2007.
From the body of the post:
Comment. Hear, hear. Yesterday I blogged a letter to the editor published in CJA. I wasn't surprised that the letter was TA, since the whole journal was TA. But I was surprised that access cost $20 for one day from one computer. For a letter to the editor. I'd supplement Heather's call to members of the CAS with a call to authors: Do you really want to hide your research in this lockbox? Profile of Harold Varmus and his work for OA Bernadine Healy, Making Science Free to All: Harold Varmus, scientist, US News and World Report, November 12, 2007. Healy, like Varmus himself, is a former director of the NIH. Excerpt:
Comment. Just a quick note on Healy's reference to the "author pays" model. She could have noted that (1) most OA journals charge no publication fees at all; (2) even when they do charge publication fees, "author pays" is a misleading and harmful term for their business model, since the fees are generally paid by the author's funder or employer, or waived by the journal, not paid by the author out of pocket; (3) while the NIH is willing to pay publication fees for grantees who submit their work to fee-based OA journals, the bill to mandate OA at the NIH does not mandate that it pay such fees; (4) OA through repositories rather than journals (green rather than gold OA) requires no fees. Sely Costa, The Open Access Movement in Brazil, EPT, November 12, 2007. (Thanks to Barbara Kirsop.) Excerpt:
Comment. This is a wonderfully useful and heartening report of very impressive progress.
D. John Doyle, Understanding the open access data movement, Canadian Journal of Anaesthesia, November 2007. A letter to the editor. Not OA, at least so far. Growth of open education resources Greg Toppo, Free online materials could save schools billions, USA Today, November 7, 2007. Excerpt:
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