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Document Freedom Day, today

Posted on 26 March 2008
Filed under Florida, Open formats, Orlando, Personal
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Today is Document Freedom Day.

I have a packet of flyers to distribute, as well as stickers and T-shirts for supporters — plus a flag to fly (literally).

This evening, I’ll go to locations around Orlando to distribute the flyers. If you want to help, or to pick up some free swag, meet me in front of the Lake Mary library at 7 pm tonight (580 Greenway Blvd., Lake Mary).

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CopyNight Orlando, March 25; plus Document Freedom Day, 3/26

Posted on 23 March 2008
Filed under Copyright, Florida, Orlando, Personal
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The February meeting of CopyNight Orlando will be Tuesday, March 25 at 7 pm at Stardust Video & Coffee (1842 E. Winter Park Rd., Orlando). This month is an open topic: whatever participants want to discuss. Learn more at copynight.org or my CopyNight page. Hope to see you there!

I’m also organizing a local activity for Document Freedom Day on March 26. Stay tuned for details.

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Great campaign on privacy and surveillance

Posted on 20 March 2008
Filed under Privacy
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The ACLU has a great message for its campaign on privacy and surveillance. I think it captures the way a lot of us feel about recent trends, and expresses the big-picture consequences.

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Re-discovering Florida’s literary legacy — or not

Posted on 15 March 2008
Filed under Academia, Florida, Libraries, Open access, Publishing
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Out of curiosity, I went Googling for literary magazines published at my alma mater, the University of Florida. What I found:

• Subtropics, published by the English department, in print since 2006. In current publication. A few items from the current issue are available online; no items from past issues are available online. The poems online are only available as an image, not as text.
• Mangrove Review (no Web site; record in UF library catalog), published by the English department(?), in print since 1985(?) (since 1982 according to Worldcat). Soliciting submissions as recently as October 2007; described there as “UF’s official literary magazine.” Alternate titles: Mangrove, Mangrove Literary Review. Web site formerly at this address; see past versions in the Internet Archive. Not to be confused with the Mangrove Review published at Florida Gulf Coast University or Mangrove at the University of Miami (popular name, eh?).
• Tea (no Web site; record in UF library catalog), published the English Society (student-run), in print since (when?). Soliciting submissions as recently as February 2008. Web site formerly at this address; see past versions in the Internet Archive.

As far as I can tell, none of these are available in UF’s Digital Collections; although the library does have their back issues, it hasn’t digitized them (at least not yet; probably for permissions issues or lack of resources).

So, of at least 3 literary magazines published at UF (who knows how many others there have been over the years?), none of them are available online. It’s not just that they’re not open access: you couldn’t pay for access if you wanted to. Two of the three appear not to even have Web sites.

It must be said that this is a terrible strategy for sharing the magazines’ contents with the public.

If any readers have information about these or other literary magazines, or any plans to digitize them, please add them in the comments.

Rumors of other literary magazines from UF’s past:

• The Florida Pennant, published by the Dixie Literary Society beginning in 1907
• The Swamp Angel, published by the Quill Club beginning in 1923
• The Silver Bow, published beginning in 1925
• Florida Quarterly, published 1967-1976, “Official student-edited literary magazine of the University of Florida”
• Departure: GNV, published from 1989 or earlier until 2002 or 2003. Web site formerly at this address; see past versions in the Internet Archive.

In the process, I turned up all sorts of other stuff… Read more

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Lancet editorial highlights 2 aspects of OA

Posted on 8 March 2008
Filed under Whatever
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An editorial in this week’s Lancet (free registration required, or see the excerpt at Open Access News) highlights two interesting aspects of open access.

First, though, some quibbles:

• The editorial claims that open archiving hasn’t been very successful (specifically: “open archiving has been less successful [than gold OA], although government mandates are likely to increase future publication on internet repositories”). What about the nearly half-million articles in arXiv?
• The editorial’s use of the word “publication” to refer to deposit in repositories is unnecessarily confusing. Although some unpublished materials (such as theses and working papers) are deposited in repositories (which could be considered “publication”), the context here is previously published papers being deposited (”archived”, “posted”) in a repository.

So, the two aspects of OA which the editorial highlights:

• OA as competitive pressure on non-OA publishers. The editorial begins by stating how the recent Harvard policysent a “cold shudder […] through the spine of the traditional publishing community”, and proceeds to ask, “How have traditional publishers responded to the research community’s interest in wider access to medical science?” It’s hard to compete with free, and — even where publishers don’t convert to OA — that competition forces publishers to improve their value proposition.
• OA as facilitator of pervasive and integrated information solutions. As the editorial argues,
  

  So what do doctors want from the information they use? They want quality and reliability. They want instant access whenever and wherever they need it. They want information in multiple formats, print, podcasts, and online. They want less, not more. They want to stay up-to-date. They want guidelines as well as individual research papers and systematic reviews. They want access to the views of key opinion leaders. They want information that is watermarked in such a way as to ensure its independence and integrity. They want information that is connected: research to reviews, images to text, testing to books. They want information to match their place and activity. Few medical publishers have paid attention to these needs. […]

  What should editors and publishers do? They need to cast dullness to one side, and become leaders instead of followers. They need to start shaping the physician’s information world, instead of reacting to it. They need to pay less attention to their financial bottom line, and commit themselves to a larger, more inspiring mission—to join doctors in working to achieve the highest attainable standards of health for the communities they serve. Most medical publishers have forgotten that mission. It is time they returned to it.

  OA isn’t necessary for any of those purposes — but it sure makes it easier. Removing permission barriers facilitates developing innovative solutions to deliver information — not just to specialists, but to researchers in other fields and the public.

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