October 7 Open Access News (FOS Blog)

(Several important items here.  -- Seth)

Open Access News - http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html


In May 2003 PubMed Central (http://pubmedcentral.com/index.html) launched a
major initiative to scan and provide free online access to the back issues
(http://pubmedcentral.com/about/scanning.html) of 21 biomedical journals.
NLM (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/) will pick up the tab, including the cost of
OCR on the scanned images to support full-text searching.

Note that I'm not calling this *open access*. Here's a statement from the
project web site: "A participating journal gives NLM permanent rights to
archive the scanned material and make it freely available to the public
through PMC, *subject to normal 'fair use' provisions of copyright law*
[emphasis added]. As with existing content in PMC, copyright for the scanned
material remains with the publisher or with individual authors, as
applicable." As I read this, users must ask the copyright holder's
permission if they want to copy an entire article e.g. to print, share with
a colleague, hand out to a class, or post online. If true, this is a rare
case of removing price barriers but not permission barriers to a body of
literature. Open access removes both. (Can anyone clarify the user rights to
this literature? Is it just fair use or is it closer to open access? I'm
trying to find out, but would appreciate any help.) (10/6/2003 2:46:56 PM)

JISC (http://www.jisc.ac.uk/) has put the first draft of its strategy
(http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=about_draft_strat_intro) online for
public comment. JISC officials will discuss the comments at a November
meeting and hope to release a final version by January 2004. Part of the
strategy is a list of 30 policy objectives, of which #9 is "[t]o provide
access to online resources (content) as broadly and widely as possible for
all learners and researchers." Several of the other objectives are
OA-related as well. (10/6/2003 1:34:30 PM)

The proceedings of the Symposium on the Role of Scientific and Technical
Data and Information in the Public Domain
(http://www7.nationalacademies.org/biso/Public%20Domain%20Symposium%20Announcement.html)
(Washington, D.C., September 5-6, 2002) have now been published as a book
from the National Academies Press
(http://www.nap.edu/books/030908850X/html/). Like all books from the NAP,
there is both a priced, printed version and a full-text, open-access
version. (10/6/2003 1:29:33 PM)

Robert Berkman and Christopher Shumway, Copyright Issues Present Ongoing
Dilemma: To Link or Not To Link?
(http://www.ojr.org/ojr/ethics/1065049186.php), *Online Journalism Review*,
October 1, 2003. An excerpt from the authors' ethics textbook for online
media professionals. It's useful at least for the many links to relevant
literature and court cases. The only problem is that it presupposes readers
who take the arguments against deep linking seriously. (PS: I'm not one of
them. Every attempt to make deep linking look like copyright infringement
strikes me as a bad joke.) (10/6/2003 11:01:13 AM)

The proceedings from the conference, Open Access to Scientific and Technical
Information: State of the Art and Future Trends
(http://www.inist.fr/openaccess/en/programme.php) (Paris, January 23-24,
2003) have been published in a special

http://iospress.metapress.com/app/home/issue.asp?wasp=f2779f55yhduwvfchh1k&referrer=parent&backto=journal,1,18;linkingdouble-issue
of *Information Services and Use* (ublicationresults,id:103157,1) (Vol. 23,
Nos. 2-3, 2003). Unfortunately, the journal only offers free online access
to the table of contents and abstracts. (Did somebody think this through?)
However, the conference web site
(http://www.inist.fr/openaccess/en/programme.php) gives free access to
videos of each presentation. (PS: I hope the conference presenters will
deposit the full-text of their presentations in their institutional archives
or at least put them on their own web sites.) (10/6/2003 8:18:54 AM)

The Milbank Quarterly (http://www.milbank.org/quarterly.html), a journal of
public health and health care policy, is published by the Milbank Memorial
Fund (http://www.milbank.org/index.html) and Blackwell Publishing
(http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/). The full text of one featured article
per issue is openly accessible. In the Archive of Featured Articles
(http://www.milbank.org/quarterly/featart.html), the featured article for
September 2003 is On Being a Good Listener: Setting Priorities for Applied
Health Services Research (http://www.milbank.org/quarterly/8103feat.html).
The lead author is Jonathan Lomas, Executive Director of the Canadian Health
Services Research Foundation (http://www.chsrf.ca/). (10/6/2003 8:36:04 AM)

Demos (http://www.demos.co.uk/) claims that it has become the "first 'open
access' think tank". On Open Access Publishing
(http://www.demos.co.uk/knowledgebase/openaccess_page298.aspx): "To mark our
tenth anniversary in 2003, Demos has created an online archive of its
publications which can be accessed free on our website". And: "From now on,
all Demos new publications can be downloaded from our website. We hope that
publishing online will mean that our ideas travel more quickly and more
widely". (10/6/2003 7:55:33 AM)

The October 6 issue of Open Access Now
(http://www.biomedcentral.com/openaccess/) is now online. This issue
features an interview (http://www.biomedcentral.com/openaccess/features/)
with Elizabeth Marincola on open access to society journals, summaries
(http://www.biomedcentral.com/openaccess/news/) of open-access policy
statements by the Russian Society of BioPsychiatry
(http://www.brain.bio.msu.ru/cpbr8) and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute
(http://www.hhmi.org/), and a profile
(http://www.biomedcentral.com/openaccess/www/) of the Open Archives
Initiative (http://www.openarchives.org/). (10/6/2003 6:56:56 AM)

Timo Burkard, Herodotus: A Peer-to-Peer Web Archival System
(http://www.pdos.lcs.mit.edu/papers/chord:tburkard-meng.pdf), a master's
thesis submitted to MIT in 2002. (Thanks to LIS News
(http://www.lisnews.com/).) Distributed users donate unused CPU cycles and
disk space to crawl the net and store its contents. Like LOCKSS
(http://lockss.stanford.edu/), it uses duplicate copies to assure
persistence. If every node could contribute 100 GB of storage, then (as of
May 2002) Burkard estimated that it would take 20,000 nodes to archive the
whole net. (PS: A quick Google search suggests that Burkard's idea has been
cited but not implemented. Does anyone know of an implementation? If it was
tried and found wanting, does anyone know how it fell short?) (10/6/2003
6:19:04 AM)

David Adam, Scientists take on the publishers in an experiment to make
research free to all
(http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,1056608,00.html), *The
Guardian*, October 6, 2003. On the upcoming launch of PLoS Biology
(http://biology.plosjournals.org/). Excerpt: "In the highly lucrative world
of cutting-edge scientific research, it is nothing short of a revolution. A
group of leading scientists are to mount an unprecedented challenge to the
publishers that lock away the valuable findings of research in expensive,
subscription-only electronic databases by launching their own journal to
give away results for free."

Quoting Vivian Siegel, executive editor of PLoS: "The goal of this journal
is to become the first destination for research in the life sciences and to
compete head-on with the existing high-profile journals. It's about doing
something you believe in rather than doing things the way everybody else
does them and I think that's the hallmark of the best scientists." Quoting
Alan Leshner, publisher of *Science*: "We're all scientists and we like
experiments, well here's an experiment. And if it works then we'll all take
the lessons from it." Quoting Jan Wilkinson, head librarian at the
University of Leeds: "We need to get academics to recognise the craziness of
what they've been doing. They do all this work and then they just hand it
over for free, and then the publishers sell it back to us at these rip-off
prices." (10/6/2003 5:08:40 AM)

Jon Udell has an interesting piece on the importance of developing
appropriate technologies to enable citation
(http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2003/10/02.html) among web based content.
His article doesn't say it, but open access to all scholarly content would
make the task of developing citation technologies much easier. (10/6/2003
12:41:32 AM)