As Peter is having some problems with his OA News feed, and as OAN is
becoming as essentially as one's morning toast for OA activists, it is
being temporarily cross-posted to the AmSci Forum. -- SH
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 11 Apr 2005 09:13:31 -0400
From: Peter Suber <peters_at_earlham.edu>
To: SPARC Open Access Forum <SPARC-OAForum_at_arl.org>
Subject: OA news, a blog substitute
I'm still unable to update the Open Access News blog <
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html>. Worse, I'm unable to
finish uploading the previous version of the file. So the blog is both
fragmented and frozen. I apologize once more for the poor service. I
still believe that the problems lie with Blogger, <
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,67138,00.html>.
But the news must go through. Feel free to forward this email version of
OA News widely, especially to people who might not know that OAN is
temporarily frozen.
Items are roughly in the order in which I discovered them, with the most
recent first --the order in which they would have appeared on the blog.
----------
* Mark Chillingworth, Consortium to deliver electronic theses, World
Information Review, April 11, 2005. Excerpt: 'JISC, the Joint Information
Systems Committee, is funding the development of an electronic resource
that will provide access to academic theses. In collaboration with the
British Library and the Consortium of Research Libraries in the British
Isles (CURL), Electronic Theses Online will be available in 12 months
time. Electronic Theses Online will provide electronic access to full-text
theses and details of electronic institutional theses repositories. The
central repository is being developed by the British Library. The partners
are developing a web interface that will provide cross searching of theses
and will protect the intellectual property rights of the theses authors.'
http://www.iwr.co.uk/IWR/1162387
* Alun Salt, Isn't Arxiv Wonderful?, April 10, 2005. A blog posting
calling for OA repositories like arXiv in archaeology and
history. Excerpt: 'My guess is that Arxiv exists because Physicists are
likely to be able to scoop each other with their work. Also their work can
absolutely be built upon for future work. Much Ancient History and
Archaeology is art. It's improved by wider reading, but I don't need to
have read the latest pomo theory to work on my own projects. Further
technophobia is an endearing character quirk in the Arts rather than a sign
of academic incompetence. I don't think it's a long term problem.
Researchers who are more interested in spreading their ideas than
supporting established structures will have greater influence on successive
generations and there will be a move to open access publishing, because
researchers who ignore it will be ignored.'
http://archaeoastronomy.co.uk/?p=7
* Anon., BBC creative licence on archive copyright, Informativ, April 11,
2005. Excerpt: 'The BBC is finally launching its creative archive
project, with the adoption of a new licensing scheme based on the creative
commons concept of "some rights reserved". The licence also has the backing
of Channel 4, the British Film Institute and the Open University....The aim
is to provide access to certain archive material for non-commercial use,
including re-use in personal projects. The initiative also has broader
public service ambitions in pioneering a new approach to public access
rights in the digital age....The idea that it may not be necessary to
enforce restrictive digital rights management is a powerful one in a
commercial world that embraces the concept of content protection and
conditional access.'
http://informitv.com/articles/2005/04/11/bbccreativelicence/
* Alan Riding, France Detects a Cultural Threat in Google, New York Times,
April 11, 2005. Excerpt: 'Money, too, is a variable. Newly rich from its
stock offering last summer, Google expects to spend $150 million to $200
million over a decade to digitize 15 million books from the collections of
Harvard, Stanford, the University of Michigan, Oxford University and the
New York Public Library. In contrast, the French National Library's
current book scanning program is modest. With an annual budget of only
$1.35 million, it has so far placed online some 80,000 books and 70,000
drawings and will soon add part of its collection of 19th-century
newspapers. "Given what's at stake, $200 million is very little money,"
Mr. Jeanneney said of Google's planned investment in its program, known as
Google Print. Specifically, he fears that Google's version of the
universal library will place interpretation of French and other Continental
European literature, history, philosophy and even politics in American
hands. This, he says, represents a greater peril than, say, American
movies, television or popular music. Google says his fears are unfounded.
It notes that, as with Google, page rankings on Google Print will be
defined by public demand and not by political, cultural or monetary
variables. Further, according to Nikesh Arora, vice president for European
operations for Google, the company fully supports all moves to make
information and books available on the Web in all languages.'
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/11/technology/11google.html?pagewanted=print&position
=
* Anita S. Coleman and Cheryl Knott Malone, Copyright Transfer Agreements
and Self-Archiving, a preprint. Abstract: 'Concerns about intellectual
property rights are a significant barrier to the practice of scholarly
self-archiving in institutional and other types of digital repositories.
This introductory level, half-day tutorial will demystify the journal
copyright transfer agreements (CTAs) that often are the source of these
rights concerns of scholars. In addition, participants will be introduced
to the deposit processes of self-archiving in an interdisciplinary
repository and open access archive (OAA), such as DLIST, Digital Library
for Information Science and Technology. Editor's Note: This is a 1-page
summary of the tutorial at the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL
'05), June 7, 2005, Denver, Colorado. It does not include the actual
tutorial. Contents: Introduction, Learning Outcomes, Topics to be covered,
About the Presenters, and References.'
http://dlist.sir.arizona.edu/archive/00000804/
* Randy Dotinga, Open-Access Journals Flourish, Wired News, April 11, 2005.
http://wired-vig.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,67174,00.html?tw=wn_2culthead
Dotinga gives a lot of space to the objection that OA journals charging
author-side fees are like vanity presses and corrupt peer review. He gives
only a little space to PLoS' response to this canard. Here's my more
extensive response,
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/03-02-04.htm#objreply
* Symposia is new software from Innovative Interfaces for creating and
maintaining OAI-compliant repositories.
http://www.iii.com/news/pr_template.php?id=238
Innovative Interfaces home page
http://www.iii.com/
* A new Slashdot thread is collecting links to individual OA books and
collections of OA books.
http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/07/1548255
An unsigned posting to Science Library Pad adds a few more links.
http://scilib.typepad.com/science_library_pad/2005/04/free_books_onli.html
* I've updated my list of university actions for open access or against
high journal prices to include the recent faculty senate resolutions at the
University of Kansas and Columbia University.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/lists.htm#actions
Peter
----------
Peter Suber
Open Access Project Director, Public Knowledge
Research Professor of Philosophy, Earlham College
Author, SPARC Open Access Newsletter
Editor, Open Access News blog
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/
peter.suber_at_earlham.edu
Received on Mon Apr 11 2005 - 14:21:11 BST