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 ---------- List-Post: goal@eprints.org List-Post: goal@eprints.org Date: Mon, 11 Apr 2005 09:13:31 -0400 From: Peter Suber <pet...@earlham.edu> To: SPARC Open Access Forum <sparc-oafo...@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.su...@earlham.edu