Re: FOS Newsletter Excerpts
Excerpts from the Free Online Scholarship (FOS) Newsletter December 26, 2001 In a 1952 essay, A. J. Muste argued that civil disobedience was useful in part because it made actual dissidents known to potential dissidents. It broke the appearance of unanimity that, by itself, discouraged many people from voicing their opposition or even thinking clearly and courageously about opposition. The growing subscription list is gratifying in part precisely for breaking the appearance of unanimity. The Public Library of Science petition has had the same effect on a much larger scale. It's odd to be working toward an exciting reform that will benefit scholars, the effective means to which are already in the hands of scholars, but which most scholars haven't yet acknowledged, let alone endorsed. We can be forgiven for welcoming the occasional bit of evidence that fellow travelers exist beyond the illusory veil of unanimity. -- More on the BioMed Central (BMC) decision to charge processing fees per article starting January 1. I should have mentioned in my previous story on this decision (FOSN for 12/19/01) that BMC will waive the processing fee not only for authors from developing countries, and authors with financial hardship, but also for authors from institutions with a BMC membership. Universities will pay much less in per-article processing fees on behalf of their researcher-employees than they now pay in subscription prices through their libraries. Moreover, because processing fees will make the resulting literature freely available online, universities willing to pay them will give their researchers more readers and impact in their fields. BMC is hoping that as universities understand these new realities, more will support this alternative financing model, and more will seek the even deeper discounts permitted by institutional memberships. BMC press release on its institutional membership program http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/pr-releases.asp?pr=20011220 (BioMed Central's business model is based on the dual premise that all original research articles should be freely available and that the imposition of subscription charges by other publishers is damaging the communication of science.) Jeffrey Young, Publisher of Free Online Science Journals Will Charge Authors a 'Processing Fee' http://chronicle.com/free/2001/12/2001122101t.htm BMC's online discussion of its alternative financing model http://www.biomedcentral.com/editorial/charges.asp -- Developments * With money from the Heritage Lottery Fund, the Wellcome Trust has bought Francis Crick's scientific and personal papers. Early in 2002 it will start indexing and digitizing them and will eventually create a free online Crick archive. http://www.biomedcentral.com/news/20011214/03 * Canada's Advanced Internet Development Organization (CANARIE) has launched a program to fund the development of advanced e-content, including projects in the arts and cultural heritage. Proposals for first-round funding will be considered until January 30. http://www.canarie.ca/press/releases/01-12-20.html * The Open Video Project, a free online video archive, is now a compliant and registered with the Open Archives Initiative. http://www.open-video.org/ * JISC and NSF have launched a joint initiative to study how digital libraries can transform teaching and learning. http://www.jisc.ac.uk/pub01/c07_01.html * The Research Libraries Group (RLG) has launched the Cultural Materials Initiative to promote online access to cultural materials, including digitized copies of rare and unique works otherwise very difficult to see. Access will not be free. http://www.rlg.org/culturalres/ * ICAAP is a non-profit organization devoted to advancing the cause of free and affordable online scholarly communication. It has just launched myICAAP, a service to help support ejournals, launch new ones, and help ejournals find qualified, willing reviewers. myICAAP is backed by the powerful BlueSky software suite (see FOSN for 6/1/01) which automates nearly every aspect of publishing an online journal except the exercise of editorial judgment. For example, editors can assign a manuscript to a reviewer, track and nag the reviewer, read the reviewer's judgment, and decide whether to accept, reject, or resubmit the manuscript, with just a few mouse clicks. With another click, an accepted article can be readied for publication in HTML, PDF, eBook, CD-ROM, or WAP formats. The software will also generate statistics on reviewer time and acceptance rates, and generate any kind of article metadata, including OAI metadata. The extensive automation saves time, labor, and money. Journals that register for myICAAP have full use of BlueSky. Scholars who register for myICAAP enter a database that participating journals may search by academic specialization when they need reviewers. Libraries are asked to pay a subscription fee based on the number of myICAAP
Re: FOS Newsletter Excerpts
Excerpts from the Free Online Scholarship (FOS) Newsletter December 19, 2001 Developments * _Cortex_, a journal of the nervous system and behavior, has just freed its contents, making its online edition free of charge to all readers with no enforced waiting periods. The new policy is the work of the new editor, Sergio Della Sala. _Cortex_ still publishes a print edition with a subscription fee, but to coincide with the new access policy it has reduced the subscription price. The journal is betting that free online access will not significantly diminish its revenues. If it does, then non-subscribers may have to wait a few months after the print edition appears before they have free online access. _Cortex_ is published by Masson Italia, a for-profit publisher. Cortex home page http://www.cortex-online.org/ Guest editorial (Viewpoint) by Stevan Harnad on the occasion of the change of policy http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/1734.html * BioMed Central will institute processing charges for articles starting on January 1. The standard charge will be $500 per article, though it will be waived for authors from developing countries and in cases of hardship. (PS: See my thoughts on this funding model from FOSN for 9/6/01. My views haven't changed in substance since then, but in temperature I've definitely warmed to the BMC model. If access is to be free, then journal operating costs must be paid by knowledge producers or third parties, not knowledge consumers. Or, funders should pay for dissemination, not for access. Hence, BMC is on the right track, all the more so for avoiding the term author fees for these processing charges.) http://www.managinginformation.com/news/content_show_full.php?id=279 * Academic Press journal articles are now searchable through Scirus. Scirus permits free full-text searching of texts that are not available for free full-text reading or printing (see FOSN for 5/25/01). http://www.scirus.com/press/Ideal106.htm * Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) has completed its Scientific Century project, the retroactive digitization of its collected bibliographic citations and abstracts. The CAS online database now contains 20.5 million records from 1907 to the present. The new historical content is part of the standard CAS license and is not separately available. http://www.cas.org/New1/1907.html * _Nature_ and three other journals have pooled their contents to create a free online collection of research papers and reviews reflecting 100 years of research on cell division. The costs are being picked up by Boehringer Ingelheim, a drug company. The site title, Web Focus on Cell Division, suggests that this may become a series with other installments or foci in the future. http://www.nature.com/celldivision/ * The European Union has decided to levy a value added tax (VAT) on web downloads. The primary target seems to be games, software, and entertainment. But the language in the EU press release is unqualified and might apply as well to scholarly articles that are (otherwise) free to readers. If so, the EU will undermine FOS with its right hand while supporting it (through many IST and CORDIS initiatives) with the left hand. http://makeashorterlink.com/?O14223B3 * The text-e online seminar has moved on to a new essay: The Future of the Internet: A Conversation with Theodore Zeldin. The Zedlin essay will be the subject of discussion until December 31. http://text-e.org/conf/index.cfm?ConfText_ID=9 * Summaries of the four major talks at the November Open Access Forum at the British Library are now online. http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/blforum.asp * Most of the proceedings of the November ICOLC conference in Finland are now online, with the rest to come soon. A large number of the papers are FOS-related. http://www.lib.helsinki.fi/finelib/programme.html * Charles W. Bailey, Jr. has put version 40 of his Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography online. The new version cites over 15,000 articles, book, and other resources on- and off-line. http://info.lib.uh.edu/sepb/sepb.html * The University of Kansas Anschutz Library has launched AmDocs, a free online archive of documents for the study of American history. It's organized by chronological period. http://www.ukans.edu/carrie/docs/amdocs_index.html * On October 10, the ACM launched the online version of Computing Reviews. This is roughly for computer scientists what the Faculty of 1000 is for biologists (see FOSN for 11/16/01). The function is similar, to guide working scientists through the wilderness of published research with short reviews of the most notable new work, when these decisions are made by a large community of experts hand-picked by the editorial board. The print version of Computing Reviews is more than 40 years old, but has definitely improved in its transition to the net. Registered users may customize a page containing reviews of new articles in their
Re: FOS Newsletter Excerpts
On Thu, 6 Dec 2001, Peter Suber pet...@earlham.edu wrote: * Also in the December _JEP_, Marshall Poe describes why online publishing will save the specialized monograph. You'll enjoy his funny, first-person account of an experiment with informal peer review, the public domain, Printing Service Providers (PSP's), and print-on-demand. http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/07-02/poe.html There is an error in this article. Around 15th paragraph in the article, the worried editor was wrong in saying that the lack of copyright notice meant that anyone could copy Marshall Poe's book without permission. Also, Marshall was wrong to say that this was what he wanted. The myth (the lack of copyright notice means that one can copy a book without permission) is common that it is mentioned first in the list of 11 common myths about copyright at http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html. Joseph Pietro Riolo ri...@voicenet.com Public domain notice: I put all of my expressions in this post in the public domain.
Re: FOS Newsletter Excerpts
On Thu, 6 Dec 2001, Peter Suber pet...@earlham.edu wrote:
The preprint is not covered by the transfer of copyright of the
refereed final draft. ...
As I mentioned before in this discussion group, this statement is not
wholly correct. It all depends on how the agreement, contract, or any
legal document is written. It could cover preprint; it could exclude
preprint. Moreover, there is no legal basis for your general
statement.
Then authors will
be at liberty to put their refereed postprints in public archives, free for
all.
Don't be too sure. The copyright will last for 70 years after the death
of author and the estate of the author may impose the control over the
access to the author's articles. The estate of Martin Luther King, Jr.
is a living proof.
In short, I want a legal basis to oppose plagiarists, who would put
their name on my work, and for-profit aggregators, who would bundle it in a
package for sale. For more details, see the statement to which I link just
below my copyright declaration (http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/copyrite.htm).
How are you going to enforce it? Your newsletter mentioned LOCKSS which
stands for Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe. A bad guy can copy your
newsletter (or any of your works), make some changes here and there,
replace your name with his pseudonym, and quietly post the newly altered
copy to some newsgroups and web servers. By the time you find out the
violation of your copyright, many copies of the unauthorized derivative
work are already saved at many places in the Internet.
Joseph Pietro Riolo
ri...@voicenet.com
Public domain notice: I put all of my expressions in this
post in the public domain.
Re: FOS Newsletter Excerpts
On Thu, 6 Dec 2001, Stevan Harnad har...@cogprints.soton.ac.uk wrote: Note that (1) this is a speculation on the part of Joseph Riolo, that (2) it is based entirely on developments in the non-give-away sector, the very sector to which all the goings-on in this Forum are explicitly NOT addressed, and that (3) in the give-away sector (refereed research preprints and postprints) all the evidence to date (10 years and 180,000 papers in physics, 500,000 papers in computer science, and countless other publicly archived preprints and postprints in home websites across disciplines) has been -- without exception, and for very good reasons -- in the direction exactly OPPOSITE to the one Mr Riolo won't be surprised that it will go in future. Hence Mr. Riolo's opinion, though he is free to express it, is at best overwhelmed by empirical evidence to the contrary, at worst completely irrelevant to the literature in question. It is very well known that the majority of copyright holders are very selective. They don't go after every unauthorized copy they can find under the sun. When they feel the impact of unauthorized copies on their control of their intellectual property rights, they will initiate the legal actions. The number of papers you mentioned is very small and does not make any great impact for many more years. For now, they are nothing and do not make a great dent in the control of the copyright holders. The empirical evidence do change, for better or worse. Joseph Pietro Riolo ri...@voicenet.com Public domain notice: I put all of my expressions in this post in the public domain.
Re: FOS Newsletter Excerpts
On Fri, 7 Dec 2001 Joseph Pietro Riolo ri...@voicenet.com wrote: ps ...The preprint is not covered by the transfer of copyright of the ps refereed final draft... As I mentioned before in this discussion group, this statement is not wholly correct. It all depends on how the agreement, contract, or any legal document is written. It could cover preprint; it could exclude preprint. Moreover, there is no legal basis for your general statement. A publisher may make two demands: (1) that you transfer the copyright to your final draft to the publisher and (2) that you remove the preprint from the web. These are independent demands in the sense that you may accede to one or both or neither. The legal basis of this position is that a contract or transfer agreement about document A is not about document B. To include a demand about B in the contract about A is simply to make two demands in the same piece of paper. ps ...Then authors will be at liberty to put their refereed postprints ps in public archives, free for all. Don't be too sure. The copyright will last for 70 years after the death of author and the estate of the author may impose the control over the access to the author's articles. The estate of Martin Luther King, Jr. is a living proof. True but beside the point. If authors hold the copyright to their articles, then they are free to put the articles online free of charge for readers. I didn't say that the articles would stay online for eternity, and of course I needn't say so. Apart from contrary heirs, there is always the heat death of the sun to consider. What does this have to do with the author's rights? ps In short, I want a legal basis to oppose plagiarists, who would put ps their name on my work, and for-profit aggregators, who would bundle it in a ps package for sale. For more details, see the statement to which I link just ps below my copyright declaration (http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/copyrite.htm). How are you going to enforce it? Your newsletter mentioned LOCKSS which stands for Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe. A bad guy can copy your newsletter (or any of your works), make some changes here and there, replace your name with his pseudonym, and quietly post the newly altered copy to some newsgroups and web servers. By the time you find out the violation of your copyright, many copies of the unauthorized derivative work are already saved at many places in the Internet. I never said enforcement would be easy. But I'd rather have a legal basis for enforcement than to have none. LOCKSS makes it impossible to be sure that all the copies of your plagiarist's plagiarism have been deleted from the net. But it has no effect on the liability of your plagiarist or the difficulty of ascertaining his or her identity. Peter Suber, Professor of Philosophy Earlham College, Richmond, Indiana, 47374 Email pet...@earlham.edu Web http://www.earlham.edu/~peters Editor, The Free Online Scholarship Newsletter http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/
Re: FOS Newsletter Excerpts
Joseph Riolo's preoccupation with declaring texts to be public-domain is based on an agenda very different from that of this Forum. It has nothing to do with freeing online access to the refereed research literature and is indeed inapplicable to it. Interested readers should go to google to find out what that agenda is all about, but for present purposes I simply ask that postings to this Forum please remain on-topic, rather than reverting to hobby-horses that are not related, or related only very superficially, to the specific focus of this Forum. On Fri, 7 Dec 2001, Joseph Pietro Riolo wrote: ps ...The preprint is not covered by the transfer of copyright of the ps refereed final draft... As I mentioned before in this discussion group, this statement is not wholly correct. It all depends on how the agreement, contract, or any legal document is written. It could cover preprint; it could exclude preprint. Moreover, there is no legal basis for your general statement. Joseph Riolo has not understood this point and I do not think anything is gained from further repetition, unless there is some new, pertinent information introduced. ps ...Then authors will be at liberty to put their refereed postprints ps in public archives, free for all. Don't be too sure. The copyright will last for 70 years after the death of author and the estate of the author may impose the control over the access to the author's articles. The estate of Martin Luther King, Jr. is a living proof. This is again a non-sequitur for the topic (and literature) at hand. Joseph Riolo is grinding another ax, and it has nothing to do with the subject matter of this Forum. ps In short, I want a legal basis to oppose plagiarists, who would put ps their name on my work, and for-profit aggregators, who would bundle it in a ps package for sale. For more details, see the statement to which I link just ps below my copyright declaration (http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/copyrite.htm). How are you going to enforce it? Your newsletter mentioned LOCKSS which stands for Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe. A bad guy can copy your newsletter (or any of your works), make some changes here and there, replace your name with his pseudonym, and quietly post the newly altered copy to some newsgroups and web servers. By the time you find out the violation of your copyright, many copies of the unauthorized derivative work are already saved at many places in the Internet. Detecting and prosecuting plagiarism is always a challenge, but this is once again a non sequitur, with respect to the matter at hand. Note that I have not replied to any of these points. Peter Suber has done so. But as it is not the first time these points have been made, and not the first time they have been replied to, and not the first time it has been pointed out that they are missing the mark insofar as the specific subject matter of this Forum is concerned, I have to add that further postings about the desirability of putting one's work in the public domain should be directed to another venue. They are not pertinent here and merely generate confusion. Stevan Harnad
Re: FOS Newsletter Excerpts
On Fri, 7 Dec 2001, Joseph Pietro Riolo wrote: On Thu, 6 Dec 2001, Stevan Harnad har...@cogprints.soton.ac.uk wrote: sh sh Note that (1) this is a speculation on the part of Joseph Riolo, that sh (2) it is based entirely on developments in the non-give-away sector, sh the very sector to which all the goings-on in this Forum are explicitly sh NOT addressed, and that (3) in the give-away sector (refereed research sh preprints and postprints) all the evidence to date (10 years and sh 180,000 papers in physics, 500,000 papers in computer science, and sh countless other publicly archived preprints and postprints in home sh websites across disciplines) has been -- without exception, and for very sh good reasons -- in the direction exactly OPPOSITE to the one Mr Riolo sh won't be surprised that it will go in future. sh sh Hence Mr. Riolo's opinion, though he is free to express it, is at best sh overwhelmed by empirical evidence to the contrary, at worst completely sh irrelevant to the literature in question. It is very well known that the majority of copyright holders are very selective. They don't go after every unauthorized copy they can find under the sun. When they feel the impact of unauthorized copies on their control of their intellectual property rights, they will initiate the legal actions. The number of papers you mentioned is very small and does not make any great impact for many more years. For now, they are nothing and do not make a great dent in the control of the copyright holders. The empirical evidence do change, for better or worse. Fine. If and when the empirical evidence changes, this matter can be discussed again. On the overwhelming evidence to date, it is merely gratuitous alarmism. Stevan Harnad
Re: FOS Newsletter Excerpts
On Sat, 8 Dec 2001, Stevan Harnad har...@cogprints.soton.ac.uk wrote: Joseph Riolo has not understood this point and I do not think anything is gained from further repetition, unless there is some new, pertinent information introduced. To be very blunt (forgive me), Stevan Harnad's position on copyright is flatly wrong. I am a bit worried that his position will become Achilles heel for some or many authors in the long term. The authors must always follow this commandment if they want to accomplish the goals in making their works available to the public without charge: You must not transfer, assign, or give up your whole copyright to anyone else anytime in your life. Putting your work in the public domain is a nice alternative and is much simpler than many other approaches but I am fully aware that this is not a popular option. So be it. Joseph Pietro Riolo ri...@voicenet.com Public domain notice: I put all of my expressions in this post in the public domain.
Re: FOS Newsletter Excerpts
Excerpts from Free Online Scholarship (FOS) Newsletter December 5, 2001 Budapest FOS conference On December 1-2 I attended a small, intense, productive, and very enjoyable conference in Budapest to map strategies for achieving FOS world-wide. The conference was hosted by the Open Society Institute (OSI), which supports this newsletter with a grant. Formally around a table and informally at meals and in walks along the Danube, we talked and talked and talked about our separate FOS initiatives, how they could achieve synergy and assist one another, how OSI could assist us, and how to accelerate progress for all. We're still at work on a product of the conference, which I'll be able to describe more fully when it's ready for the public. The conference was deeply gratifying for several reasons. It was gratifying that a major foundation was committed to the FOS cause and had brought us together to work out a common strategy. It was gratifying to find that we could agree on a path forward. It was gratifying to be thrown together with this bunch of knowledgeable and hard-working people. We were able to put aside the burden of informing newcomers and answering critics --the walking FAQ problem-- and enjoy the company and unique perspectives of like-minded activists from around the world. We were able to presuppose esoteric knowledge and jump-start deep and fruitful conversations. We were able to draw on the wide experience in the room to examine FOS obstacles in detail and take their true measure. We are able to meet people whose work we had long admired. We made many new friends. We juiced our confidence that FOS is inevitable. The trip took four days out of my news-gathering schedule. I'm about half caught up and have decided to draw the line here for this issue. By next week's issue should I should be back up to date. I'm eager to tell you the rest of the conference story, but first I have to carve out some time for the conference homework. To be continued. -- The living dead problem In the November 27 _Los Angeles Times_, David Colker points out that sensitive information removed from the web to keep it from terrorists is still available in many web archives (e.g. the Wayback Machine) and search engine caches (e.g. Google's). David Colker, The Web Never Forgets http://www.latimes.com/technology/la-94419nov27.story Chris Sherman deserves credit for making the same point as early as October 9. http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/01/sd1009-google-cache.html The difficulty of total deletion of net content is only a problem for information that lends itself to abuse, like open discussions of security gaps at nuclear power plants. But for valuable content like FOS, it's a boon. The difficulty of total deletion is really a proof-of-concept for LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe), a strategy for long-term preservation that systematically caches content in a self-correcting P2P network. See FOSN for 6/25/01. LOCKSS http://lockss.stanford.edu/ The difficulty of total deletion has one more benefit for FOS. If you put an unrefereed preprint of your work on the web, well before the moment when you might assign the copyright to a journal, and then later publish a revised or unrevised version in a journal, the journal may ask you to remove the preprint from the web. You needn't comply; but even if you try to do so, the preprint will almost certainly survive in some freely accessible form. A recent thread of the September98 forum discussed the effect of this phenomenon on copyright negotiations. Thread name, Copyright: Form, Content, and Prepublication Incarnations http://makeashorterlink.com/?R5D84203 (The topic is more explicit later in the thread than earlier.) -- * JournalSeek and LinkOpenly will merge into a new service called LinkFinderPlus. The result is a library-based (as opposed to publisher-based) reference linking system. LinkFinderPlus is based on OpenURL metadata. http://www.sbu.ac.uk/litc/lt/2001/news2214.html * The Canadian National Site Licensing Project (CNSLP) is an unusual and award-winning national consortium to bargain down the price of licences to priced online journals. (See FOSN for 9/14/01.) CNSLP met in late November to discuss expanding the scope of its activities. http://www.library.yale.edu/~llicense/ListArchives/0111/msg00031.html * On November 28, BioOne announced the first 15 consortial subscriptions since its launch nine months ago. BioOne aggregates 46 influential, peer-reviewed online science journals and makes them available at a low, competitive price. (This announcement from SPARC, one of BioONe's founding organizations, is not yet on the web at SPARC or BioOne. Sorry I can't give you a link.) * On November 28, ISI announced the official launch of its Web of Knowledge service, a very unfree library of online science and related tools. http://library.northernlight.com/FC2001112853074.html * The
Re: FOS Newsletter Excerpts
On Thu, 6 Dec 2001, Joseph Pietro Riolo wrote: ...not to underestimate the monopolistic power in the copyright. There is no sign that the power will contract. Instead, it is expanding and I won't be surprised that the copyright holders in future will force, with the threat of lawsuit, the people and entities to remove the preprints from their storage. Note that (1) this is a speculation on the part of Joseph Riolo, that (2) it is based entirely on developments in the non-give-away sector, the very sector to which all the goings-on in this Forum are explicitly NOT addressed, and that (3) in the give-away sector (refereed research preprints and postprints) all the evidence to date (10 years and 180,000 papers in physics, 500,000 papers in computer science, and countless other publicly archived preprints and postprints in home websites across disciplines) has been -- without exception, and for very good reasons -- in the direction exactly OPPOSITE to the one Mr Riolo won't be surprised that it will go in future. Hence Mr. Riolo's opinion, though he is free to express it, is at best overwhelmed by empirical evidence to the contrary, at worst completely irrelevant to the literature in question. Copyright (c) 2001, Peter Suber http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/copyrite.htm Mr. Suber, why do you need copyright in your newsletter? Why don't you liberate it by putting it in the public domain? What are you really accomplishing with copyright in your newsletter? Mr Riolo, you have received a reply to this several times in this Forum: Although the give-away authors of refereed (and unrefereed) research are not interested in receiving any money for access to their texts, they are definitely interested in retaining intellectual ownership of it. They would rather not see someone else passing their words and work off as if they were their own, and this is one of the two protections (from theft-of- text-authorship) that copyright gives them. (The other copyright protection, from theft-off-text, these give-way authors do not seek). This is why the public-domain option of which Mr. Riolo is apparently an avid advocate is not the solution for the special authors and literature that are under discussion in this Forum; indeed, it is not even relevant to it. Stevan Harnad NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing free access to the refereed journal literature online is available at the American Scientist September Forum (98 99 00 01): http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html or http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html You may join the list at the amsci site. Discussion can be posted to: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@amsci.org
Re: FOS Newsletter Excerpts
At 05:42 AM 12/6/2001 -0500, Joseph Riolo wrote: On Thu, 6 Dec 2001, Peter Suber pet...@earlham.edu wrote: The difficulty of total deletion has one more benefit for FOS. If you put an unrefereed preprint of your work on the web, well before the moment when you might assign the copyright to a journal, and then later publish a revised or unrevised version in a journal, the journal may ask you to remove the preprint from the web. You needn't comply; but even if you try to do so, the preprint will almost certainly survive in some freely accessible form. A recent thread of the September98 forum discussed the effect of this phenomenon on copyright negotiations. Thread name, Copyright: Form, Content, and Prepublication Incarnations http://makeashorterlink.com/?R5D84203 (The topic is more explicit later in the thread than earlier.) This news bit overlooks one important point and that point is not to underestimate the monopolistic power in the copyright. There is no sign that the power will contract. Instead, it is expanding and I won't be surprised that the copyright holders in future will force, with the threat of lawsuit, the people and entities to remove the preprints from their storage. If you're saying that the current trajectory of copyright law is to favor publishers over readers, I agree, and I also agree that this will probably continue. However, that doesn't affect the case I was describing above. The preprint is not covered by the transfer of copyright of the refereed final draft. The most that publishers can do in this situation is to refuse to accept the refereed final draft for publication unless the preprint is removed from the web. But this is not an exercise of intellectual property rights; it's just power negotiating. No matter how oppressive copyright law becomes, it will be irrelevant for journals that let authors retain copyright. Today they are few in number. But as new journals are created to respond to the problems created by existing publishers, more and more of them will let authors retain copyright and only ask for the right of first printing. Then authors will be at liberty to put their refereed postprints in public archives, free for all. Copyright (c) 2001, Peter Suber http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/copyrite.htm Mr. Suber, why do you need copyright in your newsletter? Why don't you liberate it by putting it in the public domain? What are you really accomplishing with copyright in your newsletter? In short, I want a legal basis to oppose plagiarists, who would put their name on my work, and for-profit aggregators, who would bundle it in a package for sale. For more details, see the statement to which I link just below my copyright declaration (http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/copyrite.htm). Peter -- Peter Suber, Professor of Philosophy Earlham College, Richmond, Indiana, 47374 Email pet...@earlham.edu Web http://www.earlham.edu/~peters Editor, The Free Online Scholarship Newsletter http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/
Re: FOS Newsletter Excerpts
Excerpts from the Free Online Scholarship (FOS) Newsletter November 26, 2001 I'll be attending an FOS conference in Budapest next week sponsored by the Open Society Institute. As a result, the next issue of the newsletter will appear after I return and catch up on my news-gathering. -- * DP9 is an open source gateway service that allows general search engines, like Google, to index OAI-compliant archives. It stands between the crawler and the archive, intercepts the crawler's requests, forwards them to the archive, and translates the archive's output from XML into HTML. This allows OAI archives hidden in the deep internet to be indexed by search engines that don't venture into the deep internet. DP9 was developed by Xiaoming Liu of the Old Dominion University DLib Group. DP9 home page http://arc.cs.odu.edu:8080/dp9/index.jsp Source code for downloading http://arc.cs.odu.edu:8080/dp9/install.jsp * The Resource Discovery Network (RDN) has launched RDN-Include, which allows higher education sites to put the RDN search engine on their pages. Sites may use the RDN search engine for a specific discipline or the general RDN search engine. Users see RDN's hit list of hand-picked resources and the useful RDN annotations on each one. The service is free for UK education sites and may be licensed by others. http://www.rdn.ac.uk/rdn-i/ * _Best of Science_ is a new free online peer-reviewed science journal covering nearly all scientific disciplines. It recoups the costs of online publication through fund-raising and author fees, which it reduces for authors from developing countries. This is welcome but standard fare. More remarkable is the pro-FOS statement of principles inspiring it, issued jointly by the ICSU (International Council for Science) and UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization). Best of Science http://bestofscience.free.fr ICSU-UNESCO statement of principles on electronic publishing in science http://bestofscience.free.fr/icsu.html * The Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity has released free, downloadable software tools to create and query scientific data stored in its national network of XML documents. http://knb.ecoinformatics.org/ * The papers presented at the November 9-11 conference on the public domain at Duke Law School are now online. (PS: Nice touch: For the PDF files, it recommends Ghostscript, the open source PDF viewer, over Adobe Acrobat.) About half the papers have a strong connection to FOS. http://www.law.duke.edu/pd/papers.html * Bookmark this useful chart to refresh your memory on when works of different vintage pass into the public domain. Thanks to the University of North Carolina's Task Force on Intellectual Property. http://www.unc.edu/~unclng/public-d.htm * The four major papers from the 2001 SLA conference on electronic journals have now been put online. http://www.sla.org/division/dst/2001papers.html * Walt Crawford has put online the index to volume 1 (2001) of his newsletter, _Cites Insights_. http://home.att.net/~wcc.techx/civ1ix.pdf * Cisco Systems has put online the results of its unique poll of Nobel laureates. The prize winners still active in research use the internet, and those whose research careers are largely behind them say they wish it had existed earlier. (Their median age is 72.) 67% said it would have enabled them to do their research more quickly, and 91% said that it will accelerate their current research. 87% said it will improve education. 91% said it will enlarge educational opportunities. 93% said it will give students greater access to libraries, information, and teachers around the world. 95% said it will help scholars disseminate their work. http://www.cisco.com/nobel/survey/ * Syracuse University's School of Information Studies wants your nominations for its second annual 21st Century Librarian Award. Librarians working toward FOS will satisfy several of the criteria listed on the award web site. Nominations are due by February 8, 2002. http://istweb.syr.edu/~librarianaward/ * Joseph Pelton, Research Professor at George Washington University and Director of the Arthur Clarke Institute, claims that the volume of the world's information is growing 200,000 times faster than the world's population. If true, then (to quote Bonita Wilson's summary of Pelton's talk), the only certainty is that the way we deal with information must and will fundamentally change. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/november01/11editorial.html * The November issue of _D-Lib_, has a large number of FOS-related articles: Lee Zia on the current state of the NSF's National Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Education Digital Library (NSDL) Program. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/november01/zia/11zia.html Jola Prinsen summarizing the sixth International Summer School on the Digital Library (August 5-10, Tilburg, the Netherlands). http://www.dlib.org/dlib/november01/prinsen/11prinsen.html
Re: FOS Newsletter Excerpts
Excerpts from the Free Online Scholarship (FOS) Newsletter November 16, 2001 * HighWire Press is now the world's largest free online archive of articles in the life sciences and overall second only on to the NASA's Astrophysics Data System. HighWire now hosts 100 journals that provide free online access to their full-texts, including back issues, and it recently hosted its 330,000th free online article. Fifty HighWire journals are planning to add free online access to their back issues in the near future. http://www.distance-educator.com/dn2.phtml?id=5623 (Thanks to David R. Krathwohl for pointing this out to me.) * The U.S. federal government will organize its free online science at a new portal, science.gov, in early 2002. science.gov (currently an empty shell) http://www.science.gov/ Background on the creation of this portal http://www.science.gov/workshop/abouttheworkshop.html (Thanks to Gary Price, VASND, for pointing this out.) * The online text-e seminar has moved on to a paper by Stevan Harnad. Harnad's paper will be the focus of discussion from November 14 to November 30. Read his paper and the comments, and consider registering to post your own comments. text-e seminar http://www.text-e.org/index.cfm?switchLang=Eng; Stevan Harnad, Skyreading and Skywriting for Researchers: A Post-Gutenberg Anomaly and How to Resolve It http://www.text-e.org/conf/index.cfm?ConfText_ID=7 * _Ariadne_ is one of a fairly small number of scholarly journals willing to publish articles on FOS issues. It has just put online the copy deadlines for its next five issues. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/about/publishing-schedule.html * Marian Dworaczek has put online the November 15, 2001, edition of her huge and hugely useful Subject Index to Literature on Electronic Sources of Information. http://library.usask.ca/~dworacze/SUBJIN_A.HTM * In the November 16 _Chronicle of Higher Education_, Scott Carlson reports that students are doing so much of their research online that there is noticeable new elbow room in university libraries. This is not entirely due to the growing adequacy of online research. A good deal seems due to the widespread belief that online sources are more adequate than they are, and that if a text isn't available online, then either it doesn't exist or it isn't worth finding. (PS: FOS proponents above all should be wary of this falling in to this trap; see the Ellen Roche story in FOSN for 8/23/01.) http://chronicle.com/free/v48/i12/12a03501.htm * The November 16 _Chronicle_ also published my letter to the editor in response to John Ewing's October 12 article, in which he offered several arguments against FOS. My letter is a slightly revised and shortened version of the reply to Ewing I published in FOSN for 10/12/01. http://makeashorterlink.com/?R5B13292 * In his November 11 column for _Planet eBook_ Sam Vaknin reviews the debate among ebook publishers on whether to encrypt and copy-protect the text or to set it free. He argues that the medium is at least as important as the message, and that many users will always prefer printed books. To compete, ebook publishers should let go and make their ebooks at least as accessible. http://www.planetebook.com/mainpage.asp?webpageid=266nl * In a November posting to _LTWorld_, the PALS Usage statistics working group outlines its work in setting standards for collecting usage statistics for online databases and journals. http://www.sbu.ac.uk/litc/lt/2001/news2200.html * In a November 8 posting to _ClickZ_, Gerry McGovern tells us how free content has damaged the content industry. Of course he's talking about non-academic content, but it's fascinating to read his a priori argument that free content can never be high quality. (PS: Compare the quality of the average paper in CogPrints, say, with the quality of the average episode of _The Dating Game_.) http://www.clickz.com/article.php/919401 * In the November 1 _Library Journal_, Andrew Richard Albanese reviews recent initiatives by SPARC, the Public Library of Science, arXiv, and a handful of others, to produce free or affordable alternatives to traditional print journals, and focuses on the role of librarians in these initiatives. He concludes with an interview with Karen Williams, who leads the effort by the University of Arizona library to publish the free online _Journal of Insect Science_ (see FOSN for 10/19/01). http://libraryjournal.reviewsnews.com/index.asp?layout=articlearticleid=CA178186 * In the November/December _Educause Review_, Kevin M. Guthrie reviews the methods and importance of digital archiving. He concludes that archiving for preservation is less sexy than digitizing for access, but is still less expensive than print archiving and deserves a higher priority than many institutions are giving it. http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/erm0164.pdf * The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) would like your nominations for its annual Pioneer Awards. Nominees
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[Excerpts from] the Free Online Scholarship (FOS) Newsletter November 2, 2001 Huge free online astronomy database funded The NSF has given $10 million to 17 institutions to create a web-based National Virtual Observatory. This will be a unified front end to 17 huge databases of astronomical observations and related data. It will function like an observatory, allowing researchers and students to call up observations of any part of the sky, free of charge, no waiting, whether it is day or night at the user's spot of Earth. It will also draw together quantitative data about celestial objects, permitting unprecedented comparisons and integration with observations. The entire NVO archive will contain about 100 terabytes of data to start, and grow to more than 10 petabytes by 2008. Brian Krebs, National Virtual Observatory To Put Universe Online http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/171661.html National Virtual Observatory http://www.us-vo.org/ * Postscript. For comparison, the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, which archives nearly the entire internet (see FOSN for 10/26/01), also contains 100 terabytes of data. How big is 100 terabytes? http://www.archive.org/xterabytes.html While the NVO is a very big archive, it's not the biggest on the drawing boards. As far as I can tell, this title belongs to the Particle Physics Data Grid, a project to build the infrastructure for multi-petabyte data sets in particle physics. http://www.ppdg.net/ http://www.cacr.caltech.edu/ppdg/proposal.html -- More on journal resignations * Alison Buckholtz from SPARC has pointed me toward two new specimens for our growing collection of journal editors who resign from expensive print journals in order to launch free or affordable online journals. One is a case from this year in which a handful of editors resigned from _Topology and Its Applications_ in order to launch _Algebraic and Geometric Topology_. The other case is the oldest in the collection so far. In 1989, Eddy van der Maarel and most of his editorial board resigned from _Vegetatio_ in order to launch the _Journal of Vegetation Science_. For details on both cases, see my separate page of FOS lists. http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/lists.htm#declarations (Thanks to Alison Buckholtz and Eddy van der Maarel for helping me gather the background facts on these cases.) * In the last issue I told the story of the editor resignations from the _Journal of Academic Librarianship_ and provided a link to comments on the resignations by Steve McKinzie. In the September issue of LIBRES, Tony Seward has a reply to McKinzie's comments. Seward presents data showing that the subscription price hike that allegedly triggered the resignations could not have been imposed by Elsevier, the journal's buyer. McKinzie's comments http://libres.curtin.edu.au/libres11n1/smjg.htm Seward's reply and correction http://libres.curtin.edu.au/LIBRE11N2/ * In the last issue I published a dead link for the _Journal of Academic Librarianship_ because I didn't have a live one. Here's are two live, current links. http://www.elsevier.com/locate/issn/00991333 (Thanks to Paul Pival.) http://www.elsevier.com/locate/jacalib (Thanks to Tom Kirk.) -- * Google may start to charge for specialized searches in vertical markets. Medicine, technology, perhaps other academic disciplines may count as vertical markets for this purpose. http://www.silicon.com/bin/bladerunner?30REQEVENT=REQAUTH=2104614001REQSUB=REQINT1=48619 http://www.business2.com/articles/web/0,,34856,FF.html * In the plus column, Google has started to index Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Rich Text Format, and PostScript files. It already indexes PDF files, and is one of the few search engines to do so. This new format-literacy greatly increases its coverage of academic content. As with PDF files, Google will display a non-HTML file in makeshift HTML at the user's choice. http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/01/sd1031-google-files.html -- New on the net * PubMed now supports searches on a growing library of full-text books. Users can search any book individually or the whole collection at once. Or you can take advantage of PubMed's sophisticated method of integrating them with journal abstracts. When you search PubMed's journal literature, find something relevant, and pull up its abstract, at first it is static text, just as before. But with one click, its key terms are converted to links to explanatory parts of the searchable books, making PubMed abstracts instantly more useful to non-specialists. When you click on a term and jump to a section of a book, you can scroll from where you find yourself within limits set by the publisher --i.e. all the books are full-text searchable but not all are full-text browsable. The book collection currently contains six biomedical textbooks and is growing. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=Books * The Machine-Assisted Reference Section
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Excerpts from Free Online Scholarship (FOS) Newsletter October 26, 2001 More follow-up on the _Machine Learning_ resignations * Andrea Foster has a good article about the resignations in the October 18 _Chronicle of Higher Education_. http://chronicle.com/free/2001/10/2001101801t.htm * Robin Peek tells the story for _InfoToday_, October 22. http://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb011022-3.htm * Tom Kirk, Head Librarian at Earlham College, wrote with another specimen for the collection of editorial resignations. In 1998 most of the editorial board of the _Journal of Academic Librarianship_ resigned to protest the large hike in the subscription price imposed by Pergamon-Elsevier after it bought the journal from JAI Press. Several of the editors who resigned then created _Portal: Libraries and the Academy_ at Johns Hopkins University Press. In the first issue of _Portal_ Gloriana St. Clair published a statement explaining why she and her co-founders thought it necessary to create an affordable competitor to JAL. Unfortunately, like other Portal articles, her statement is part of Project MUSE and not available online for free. I've written to _Portal_ for more details and may have them to report in the next issue. Gloriana St. Clair, statement in _Portal_ 1.1 on the need for _Portal_ http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/portal_libraries_and_the_academy/v001/1.1st_clair.html (Accessible only to paid MUSE subscribers.) -- What are learned societies saying? In FOSN for 8/16/01, I offered to make a web page collecting the policy statements on FOS issues made by learned societies and professional associations --if only you would send me the URLs of the statements in your field or known to you. So far nobody has taken me up on the offer. I have these two statements so far. Do you know of others? I'll include statements by learned societies in any discipline and any country. American Psychological Association http://www.apa.org/journals/posting.html American Physical Society ftp://aps.org/pub/jrnls/copy_trnsfr.asc * Postscript. I've add this list to the new page of FOS lists. If the list grows, you can watch it grow there. http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/lists.htm#statements -- * The NSF has awarded Cornell University a $1.56 million grant to develop software to collect scientific information from hundreds of sites across the internet, organize it, and make it accessible to users through a unified front end. The software will mine OAI archives and deep web sites inaccessible to most other search engines. The NSF calls this the Core System for the National Science Digital Library. (PS: The heavy reliance on government funding suggests that the final product will be free for users, but I haven't seen this stated explicitly anywhere. Does anyone know how this stands?) http://www.newswise.com/articles/2001/10/NSDLCOR.CNS.html -- In other publications * In an October 18 posting to the _Nature_ FOS debate, Carol Tenopir and Donald King summarize their research on the use and costs of scientific journals from 1960 to 2000. They point out but do not fully explain the paradox that print journal prices have risen faster than inflation while publishing costs per page, costs per author, and costs per reading have all declined. One conclusion: Much of the current ill will stems from ignorance -librarians and scientists do not understand the causes of rising journal prices, and publishers...are afraid of becoming obsolete if readers have access to articles without paying for them. http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Articles/tenopir.html * In another October 18 posting to the _Nature_ debate, David Worlock argues that the nature of scholarship is changing faster than publishers, scholars, and libraries can finish fighting their old battles. Technologies like DOIs and CrossRef show unprecedented collaboration between publishers and researchers, and the OAI will transform article storage and searching. At the same time, the Semantic Web is changing the unit of scholarship from the text article to the knowledge-structure. http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Articles/worlock.html * In the October 15 _Library Journal_, Roy Tennant surveys a variety of cross-database search technologies and describes the concept for newcomers. http://libraryjournal.reviewsnews.com/index.asp?layout=articlearticleid=CA170458 (Free registration required.) * In the October issue of _Haematologica_, Moreno Curti and three co-authors report on their longitudinal study of biomedical journals from 1995 to 2000. During this period, 85% of the journals studied added some kind of free online content. During the same period, the median impact factor for the set of journals studied showed a statistically significant rise. The association between higher impact factors and free online content was also statistically significant.
Re: FOS Newsletter Excerpts
-- Forwarded message -- List-Post: goal@eprints.org List-Post: goal@eprints.org Date: Fri, 12 Oct 2001 13:09:47 -0400 From: Peter Suber pet...@earlham.edu To: suber-...@topica.com Subject: Re: FOS Newsletter Excerpts Welcome to the Free Online Scholarship (FOS) Newsletter October 12, 2001 Journal editors resign to protest publisher's policies Forty editors of the _Machine Learning Journal_ (MLJ) have resigned from the editorial board and published their reasons in a public letter dated October 8. The MLJ editors were frustrated by the reluctance of Kluwer, their publisher, to adapt the journal to the digital age. They asked Kluwer to lower the subscription price and provide free online access to the articles. Without these changes, the subscription price limited access to the very researchers whom the journal ought to serve. Quoting the public letter: While these [subscription] fees provide access for institutions and individuals who can afford them, we feel that they also have the effect of limiting contact between the current machine learning community and the potentially much larger community of researchers worldwide whose participation in our field should be the fruit of the modern Internet. Kluwer agreed to lower the individual subscription price (to $120) but would not lower the institutional price (at $1,050) or provide free online access to the articles. Leslie Pack Kaelbling resigned as one of MLJ's action editors and began looking for a publisher willing to host a journal on machine learning more in keeping with her vision of wide and free online access. She struck a remarkable deal with MIT Press. She would launch a new journal, the _Journal of Machine Language Research_ (JMLR) which would provide free online access to all its articles and publish them online as soon as they were accepted. Quarterly, MIT would publish a print edition at a reasonable subscription price. MIT brought in the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) to use its international network of member libraries to guarantee an adequate subscription base for the new journal. Finally, JMLR would leave copyrights in the hands of authors. MIT would only have the right of first print publication and the right of first refusal on anthologies of JMLR articles. MIT agreed, in effect, not to own the journal or its contents, but only to publish the print edition. No money changes hands between JMLR and MIT. MIT can agree to these terms in part because JMLR editors keep costs down by providing online- and print-ready copy in PDF format. MIT is also willing to experiment with new ways of doing business in the digital age. Once JMLR was in the cards, Leslie invited all the MLJ editors to join her at the new journal, without necessarily resigning from MLJ. All but a handful chose to resign and join her. Some are editors at both journals. While the 40 resignations have taken place over the past nine months, the 40 agreed only recently to publish a joint, signed open letter. Their purpose was to describe their grievance with Kluwer and to explain to the world that JMLR is not the raw newcomer that it might otherwise appear to be. Hiring and tenure committees should understand that JMLR is the leading journal in the field of machine learning, even if its citation history and impact factor have not had time to reflect the eminence and experience of its editorial board. Thanks to Leslie Pack Kaelbling for sharing these details with me in an interview on October 9. Public letter of resignation (October 8, 2001) http://www.cs.orst.edu/~dambrosi/uai-archive/0822.html [old journal] Machine Learning (aka Machine Learning Journal) http://www.wkap.nl/journalhome.htm/0885-6125 [new journal] Journal of Machine Learning Research http://www.jmlr.org SPARC home page http://www.arl.org/sparc/ * Postscript. This should remind you of November 1999 when the entire editorial board of the _Journal of Logic Programming_ (published by Elsevier) resigned and created the _Theory and Practice of Logic Programming_ (published by Cambridge). See FOSN for 5/11/01. http://www.topica.com/lists/suber-fos/read/message.html?mid=1602797702sort=dstart=0 It should also remind you of the 1998 decision by Michael Rosenzweig and the rest of his editorial board to resign from _Evolutionary Ecology_, which Rosenzweig had launched in 1986, in order to create _Evolutionary Ecology Research_. Are there are other, similar stories that belong on this short list? http://www.arl.org/create/resources/stories.html#eer -- Will FOS do harm? More harm than good? In the October 12 _Chronicle of Higher Education_, John Ewing argues against a thoughtless rush into FOS. His most specific reason for caution is that small independent publishers have the thinnest profit margins and will be the first to fail in competition with FOS. If they fail
Re: FOS Newsletter Excerpts
Excerpts from the Free Online Scholarship (FOS) Newsletter October 5, 2001 * The federal Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has awarded $3.5 million to 18 libraries to digitize some of their collections and put them on the internet free of charge. http://www.imls.gov/whatsnew/current/092501-4.htm * ITPapers.com is a new archive of white papers in information technology. Users must register, but registration is free of charge. ITPapers offers free online access to 23,000+ white papers. http://itpapers.com/ * The Resource Discovery Network (RDN) invites all its users to fill out a web questionnaire. It will remain online until late November or early December. All who participate will be entered in a drawing for Amazon gift certificates. http://www.rdn.ac.uk/evaluation/ * in the October issue of _Learned Publishing_, Joost Kircz argues that an electronic scientific articles is not merely a print article in a new medium. We should rethink the nature and purpose of the scientific publications in light of the opportunities offered by the new medium. He discusses 10 criteria for scientific publications (formulated by an international working group in 2000) and argues that they leave much room to create new ways of expressing knowledge in an electronic, interactive medium. Part 2 of his study will appear in the next issue. http://ernesto.catchword.com/vl=87878194/cl=32/nw=1/fm=docpdf/rpsv/catchword/alpsp/09531513/v14n4/s4/p265 * Also in the October issue of _Learned Publishing_, Edwin Shelock criticizes the ALPSP and learned societies for failing to take advantage of opportunities created by the internet for wide and inexpensive dissemination of scholarship. He asks why learned societies think more like commercial publishers than their own members. Shelock is past chair of the ALPSP. http://ernesto.catchword.com/vl=87878194/cl=32/nw=1/fm=docpdf/rpsv/catchword/alpsp/09531513/v14n4/s9/p299 * In the October issue of _Cultivate Interactive_, Thibault Heuzé summarizes the many projects of the EU's Community Research and Development Information Service (CORDIS) for promoting access to online research. http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue5/cordis/ * The September 20 _Economist_ describes the Stanford Archival Vault (SAV), Stanford's new P2P network of digital repositories. http://www.economist.com/science/tq/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=779564 * In the August/September issue of SPARC's e-news, Ed Sponsler and Eric F. Van de Velde review the eprints.org software for creating OAI-compliant archives, based on the CalTech Library's eight month experience with it. The authors endorse the software and describe in good detail how to implement and take full advantage of it. http://www.arl.org/sparc/pubs/enews/aug01.html#6 * In the latest (2001 but undated) _Educause Quarterly_, Joseph Moxley argues that universities should join the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD), which would provide free online access to this large and useful body of literature. http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/eqm0139.pdf * Summer School on the Digital Library 2001: Electronic Publishing http://cwis.kub.nl/~ticer/summer01/course3/ Florence, October 7-12 * Frankfurt Book Fair, How To Implement DOIs http://www.doi.org/news/010926-Frankfurt.html Frankfurt, October 10 * Frankfurt Book Fair, Financing Possibilities for Digital Content http://www.cordis.lu/econtent/frankfurt_101001.htm Frankfurt, October 10 * IT in the Transformation of the Library http://www.lita.org/forum01/index.htm Milwaukee, October 11-14 * Collections Access for the 21st Century Scholar: A Forum to Explore the Roles of the Research Library http://www.arl.org/forum/index.html Washington, D.C., October 19-20 * Intellectual Property Rights in the Knowledge-Based Economy http://ip.nationalacademies.org/calendar.php?id=94 Washington, D.C., October 22 * International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications 2001 http://www.nii.ac.jp/dc2001/ Tokyo, October 22-26 * e-Book Lessons: From Life-Cycle to User Experiences http://www.sspnet.org/public/articles/details.cfm?id=181 Waltham, Massachusetts, October 23 * Fourth Meeting of the [NAS] Committee on Intellectual Property Rights (only parts are open to the public) http://ip.nationalacademies.org/calendar.php?id=322 Washington, D.C., October 23-24 * Copyright Issues in the Electronic Age http://www.sspnet.org/public/articles/details.cfm?id=181 Waltham, Massachusetts, October 29 * Paperless Publishing: Peer Review, Production, and Publication http://www.sspnet.org/public/articles/details.cfm?id=181 Washington, D.C., October 30 * The XML Revolution: What Scholarly Publishers Need to know http://www.sspnet.org/public/articles/details.cfm?id=181 Waltham, Massachusetts, November 1 * Information in a Networked World: Harnessing the Flow http://www.asis.org/Conferences/AM01/index.html Washington D.C., November 2-8 * Content Summit 01
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The Free Online Scholarship (FOS) Newsletter September 14, 2001 Please let all of you and yours be alive and safe. There are certain images from Tuesday that I will never get out of my head. Sometimes they derail all productive thought, and sometimes they energize. This issue of the newsletter arose from the spells of energy in between the spells of numbness. I'd like to say that I got back to work to avoid giving the attackers the victory of stopping me, but in fact this issue is much more like a twitch, a product of involuntary energy. It's here when you're ready, but I don't expect anyone to be ready. Working for free online scholarship can support open societies that will not threaten others even if they are intrinsically open to attack by others. But unfortunately the connection is remote and indirect (more below). So getting back to work for us does little to prevent future attacks or help the victims of this one. We should take care of first things first, but then we should get back to work. The consolation is that when life returns to normal, it will be enriched by what we do, and doing it despite the strife around us is a way of making peace. If you need help finding a friend or relative, you've probably already turned to the kinds of help that are available. If you aren't sure what's available, here are two good lists: http://www.researchbuzz.com/911.html http://websearch.about.com/library/searchtips/bltotd010911.htm The best source of post-attack news I've seen is a blog set up by SiliconValley.com. (Hit Refresh on your browser every hour or so to get the newest postings.) http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/special/attack/blog.html There are lots of new discussion groups to share grief and support. Here's one set up by Andy Carvin. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/sept11info Not all of us made it. If you can, please donate money or blood. http://www.redcross.org/ These sites make credit card donations to the Red Cross easy. Amazon, http://www.amazon.com/paypage/PKAXFNQH7EKCX PayPal, http://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=p/gen/relief-outside Yahoo, http://paydirect.yahoo.com/PD/onePage/onePageRedCrossMoney-drv.pd -- Open societies and open scholarship There are complex and subtle connections between the kind of open society that is most vulnerable to acts of terror and the kind of open scholarship that is the focus of the FOS movement and this newsletter. Open democracies can limit scholarship to those who can afford to buy it. This was the norm before the internet gave us a viable alternative, and it is still the norm in most disciplines today. But the converse tends not to hold. Societies that limit democracy in the name of security also tend to regulate scholarship in the name of security. The February jailing of Chinese scholar, Li Shaomin, for accepting Taiwanese funds to research subjects politically taboo in China is only one recent example in a dismally long list. We should not confuse free as unpriced with free as uncensored. Open societies can put a price on literature more consistently than they can silence it. Leaving it uncensored is no barrier to charging money for it. But putting it online free of charge is a barrier to censorship, even if it is one that governments around the world are gradually learning to surmount. The U.S. is an open democracy. It may fall short of your ideal of an open democracy, and even its own. But when judged against past and present democracies, rather than ideals, it is far to the open end. Yet the U.S. has convicted 2600 Magazine for publishing source code and linking to web sites that did the same. The U.S. is prosecuting Dmitri Sklyarov for writing, discussing, and selling source code. Edward Felten may be prosecuted for the same acts, and has yet to get a court to declare that he had a First Amendment right to publish the fruits of his research. It already seems that one response to the attacks on New York and Washington will be the kind of diminution of liberty that facilitates law enforcement, for example, more airport searches, more sidewalk face scanning, more email eavesdropping, less strong encryption. If so, then the U.S. will become a less open society. But it will not on that account alone become less open with its scholarship. So above all, let's not oversimplify. Open societies do not guarantee open scholarship, and open scholarship does not guarantee open societies. Within limits, each can take its lumps without the other suffering. However, each is an important support, in a complex web of support, for the other. Hence, they tend to thrive or suffer together. Unfortunately, seeing them both compromised and limited is more common than seeing both thrive. This is a reason for special vigilance in the months to come. Li Shaomin, Jailers Who Thrive on Silence
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Welcome to the Free Online Scholarship (FOS) Newsletter September 6, 2001 Since mid-May I've followed the rule of thumb not to publish issues more often than once a week. So I apologize that this issue arrives only six days after the last one. The reason is that tomorrow I'll be busy with other obligations and the day after that Topica will be down for maintenance. Besides, I already have an issue's worth ready to go. Unless there's an unusual surge of FOS news in the coming days, I'll give us both a break next week. -- What happened? The Public Library of Science deadline (September 1) is now behind us. What is the consequence of 26,000+ scientists worldwide pledging not to cooperate as authors, editors, or referees with journals that do not make their contents freely accessible online within six months of print publication? If you've seen news stories, send me the URLs. If you've seen news firsthand, send me an account. Public Library of Science http://www.publiclibraryofscience.org/ -- BioMed Central's method of FOS BioMed Central (BMC) has a business model that combines revenue for the publisher with free online access for readers. It deserves wider examination and discussion, and perhaps imitation. To learn more about it, I've conducted an informal email interview over the past two weeks with Jan Velterop, BMC's publisher. BMC publishes 18 biology journals and 41 medical journals, and plans to publish others in the future. All of these are peer-reviewed, and all of them provide free online access to their research articles. Readers need not even register. Hence, the content is not hidden behind passwords and can be crawled by major search engines. BMC also hosts what it calls affiliated journals. These make their research articles freely accessible, but charge for reviews, commentaries, and other content going beyond research itself. How does BMC pay its costs so that readers don't have to? One source of revenue is the non-research literature in its affiliated journals. Another source is advertising. In the future BMC may offer alert services and peer recommendations. If it does, then it will charge for them. However, the most interesting and controversial source of revenue will be author fees. Jan defended the idea in a June 13 opinion piece published at his site (and described in the July 3 FOSN). But BMC has not yet adopted the policy, and will not do so until 2002 at the earliest. The idea is to charge authors about $500 per article. Jan estimates that this will cover the full cost of electronic publication (peer review, mark-up, hosting, and preservation). He also estimates that it is roughly one-tenth the cost of print publication, at least in the STM fields. The fee would be waived for authors from developing countries and in some other circumstances. I have some thoughts about author fees and welcome yours; see the next item, below. Meantime, we must admit that making literature freely available to users is not free for publishers, and that author fees can generate the revenue needed to bear these costs. Moreover, BMC will set the fee at the actual cost (taking into account the cost of waivers) so that it is not more burdensome than it has to be. Finally, at least in the case of BMC, the fees will be levied in fields where most research is funded and authors might be able to pay the fee with soft money. Even if you hold your applause for author fees, BMC is doing a lot right. It is committed to free online access for all the research articles in all its journals. It always leaves copyright in the hands of the author. It has solved the long-term preservation problem as well as print publications have, by archiving actual print-outs once a year. Moreover, it doesn't confine its online content to its own site or its own database. It shares them with related, public sites like PubMed Central. By going beyond free online access to participation in common disciplinary archives, it meets even the lesser-known conditions of the Public Library of Science initiative. Finally, BMC is interested in taking this model beyond biology and medicine to other fields. If other publishers do so as well, BMC will welcome them as supporters of a new and better publishing paradigm, not as competitors. BioMed Central http://www.biomedcentral.com/ Jan Velterop's original case for author fees (June 13, 2001) http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-8219/2/2 -- What do you think of author fees? I'll be frank: I have mixed feelings about author fees. On the one hand, author fees give readers free online access to the literature and they give journals the revenue they need to make it happen. On the other hand, many authors won't be able to afford them. While I admit that journals providing free online access need some revenue, it remains the case (1) that journals needn't get their revenue from authors and (2) that we can achieve free
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Peter Suber's Free Online Scholarship Newsletter http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/index.htm is such a valuable resource that I have bounced my own copy to the Forum (at the risk of having my subscription unsubscribed by anyone who gets it!). [Peter: is there any way to subscribe the AmSci Forum itself to the FOS Newsletter in such a way that it does not receive the UNSUB code with every Newsletter?] On Thu, 6 Sep 2001, Peter Suber wrote: However, the most interesting and controversial source of revenue will be author fees. ... BMC has not yet adopted the policy, and will not do so until 2002 at the earliest. The idea is to charge authors about $500 per article. Jan estimates that this will cover the full cost of electronic publication (peer review, mark-up, hosting, and preservation). He also estimates that it is roughly one-tenth the cost of print publication, at least in the STM fields. The fee would be waived for authors from developing countries and in some other circumstances. May I just add that the only ESSENTIAL cost here is the peer review (implementation) cost (because peers referee for free)? The rest is just an OPTION, an ADD-ON, if the work is self-archived by its author in his institution's OAI compliant Eprint Archive. It is for this reason a misnomer to call the essential cost of peer-review (implementation) a page charge, because that unfortunately perpetuates the Gutenberg-era practise of holding the essentials (peer review) hostage to the optional add-ons (mark-up, hosting, preservation). Distributed, institution-based OAI-compliant http://www.openarchives.org Eprint Archives http://www.eprints.org and services can do the hosting and preservation, and the author can do the minimal mark-up called for by OAI-compliance. This frees the refereed literature. Then the optional publisher add-ons can be paid for in any of a number of ways (Subscription, Site-License, Pay-Per-View [S/L/P], etc.), Author-Page-Charges being only one of the possibilities. This PostGutenberg partitioning into the essentials and the add-ons http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/cgi/psyc/newpsy?11.084 is not just a pedantic exercise. It is the only way to get the real factors into focus. Then we can make an informed judgement, instead of wrapping it all together into the one Gutenberg option, as before. [There is some debate over how much the essential service (peer review) actually cost, per paper. I think it averages $200 per paper, across the entire corpus of 20K journals. APS Editors have reported in this Forum that their essential peer-review costs are $500 per paper, without counting in the add-ons (mark-up, hosting, preservation). These are empirical questions, but insofar as BMC is concerned, the premise here is that the $500 includes the essentials AND the add-ons, whereas what we should be talking about is ONLY the portion that covers the essentials (which I think will prove to be closer to $200 per paper for the average journal).] What do you think of author fees? I'll be frank: I have mixed feelings about author fees. On the one hand, author fees give readers free online access to the literature and they give journals the revenue they need to make it happen. On the other hand, many authors won't be able to afford them. While I admit that journals providing free online access need some revenue, it remains the case (1) that journals needn't get their revenue from authors and (2) that we can achieve free online scholarship without getting it from journals. Not only is it a misnomer to refer to page charges, but it is a misnomer to refer to author fees. Some forms of payment (e.g., author page charges) are indeed author fees. But the neutral way to describe the costs of the peer-review service that provides the quality-control and certification of a research institution's (e.g., a university's) research output is as research peer-reviewing costs. Like all the other costs associated with doing research, those costs are not the author/researcher's but the research institution's. So, to put it simply, it is misleading and prejudicial to present the options as a choice between either (1) an S/L/P-fee-based, non-free refereed literature or (2) an author-fee based free refereed literature! Those are not the true alternatives. The true alternatives are: (i) wrapping the essential peer-review costs in inextricably with the inessential add-ons, and then charging for the joint PRODUCT (via S/L/P, author fees, or what have you), as we do now, or (ii) freeing the refereed draft (through institutional self-archiving) and paying for the essential peer review SERVICE (if and when the publisher's institutional S/L/P revenue is no longer enough to pay for it) out of the (institutional!) S/L/P savings (not the author's pocket!). http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/399we152.htm First, journals needn't get their revenue from authors. The costs of online
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Welcome to the Free Online Scholarship Newsletter August 23, 2001 Introducing the Guide to the FOS Movement I'm very pleased to announce that I've finished the first draft of my Guide to the FOS Movement. This is a guide to the terminology, acronyms, initiatives, standards, technologies, and players in the movement to publish scholarly literature on the internet and make it available to readers free of charge. Now that it's online, I can revise, enlarge, and update it, which will be much easier than writing the present draft. I welcome your suggestions. I have about 30 entries waiting to include, but don't hesitate to report omissions. I also welcome corrections and comments of any kind. The guide has many purposes. It should help you find background on unexplained terms or names you encounter in research on any FOS-related topic. For the same reason, it will allow me to use terms and names here in the newsletter without explaining each one every time. Above all, it should make it easier for specialists from one sector (e.g. research, libraries, publishing) to understand the contributions to this movement made by specialists from other sectors. This movement isn't only multi-disciplinary, encompassing all the academic disciplines, but also multi-industrial, drawing on libraries and universities and such varied economic sectors beyond the academy as publishing, telecommunications, software engineering, philanthropy, and government. It is also multi-national, building on the work of individuals and organizations from around the world. Without special study one cannot appreciate the contributions of all these players to the FOS movement. I hope the guide brings recognition to the contributors and understanding to those hoping to see the big picture. Guide to the FOS Movement http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/guide.htm -- The Ellen Roche story Ellen Roche was a healthy 24 year old lab technician at the Johns Hopkins (JH) Asthma Center. She volunteered to take part in an experiment to understand the natural defenses of healthy people against asthma. Roche was part of a group that inhaled hexamethonium, a drug which induced a mild asthma attack. Physicians stood by in case of complications and to measure how the subjects responded to the asthma attack. Within 24 hours of inhaling the drug, Roche had lost one-third of her lung capacity. Within a month she was dead. The consent form she signed warned of coughing, dizziness, and tightness in the chest, but not death. It called hexamethonium a medication although its approval by the FDA (as a treatment for high blood pressure) had been withdrawn in 1972. Here's the FOS connection: Dr. Alkis Togias, the director of the experiment, apparently limited his hexamethonium research to one contemporary textbook and PubMed. The use of hexamethonium in the 1950's to treat high blood pressure created an evidentiary trail revealing some disturbing risks. Several articles published in print journals during the 1950's showed that hexamethonium could cause fatal lung inflammation. Unfortunately, PubMed's coverage starts in the mid-1960's. When the FDA withdrew its approval of hexamethonium in 1972, it cited the drug's substantial potential toxicity. Unfortunately, PubMed covers medical research, not FDA rulings. The JH internal investigation found literature on the dangers of hexamethonium in Google and Yahoo. Medical librarians who subscribe to the MedLib listserv found relevant information in online sources other than PubMed. At least one expert witness has already zeroed in on the sloppiness of the research. Quoting Dr. Frederick Wolff, professor emeritus at the George Washington School of Medicine: This is just laziness. What happened is not just an indictment of one researcher, but of a system in which people don't bother to research the literature anymore. Ellen Roche died on June 2, and the Roche family has apparently not yet filed a lawsuit. However, JH still faced a serious sanction. On July 19 the federal Office for Human Research Protection (OHRP) suspended all JH research on human subjects. This halted 2,400+ ongoing experiments with 15,000+ human subjects. The disruption was administratively chaotic, devastating to research, and potentially grave for patients participating in experiments who suddenly found their medication withheld. Perhaps for this reason the OHRP lifted the suspension three days later, though with the requirement that experiments meet new safeguards. What does this case imply about PubMed and FOS generally in high-stakes research? See the next item below for some comments. Eva Perkins, Johns Hopkins' Tragedy: Could Librarians Have Prevented a Death? http://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb010806-1.htm Report of FDA investigation http://www.fda.gov/ora/frequent/483s/JohnHopkins483.html Report of Johns Hopkins internal investigation
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The discussion reply is a misunderstanding: from paper age with publish first, with ONE type of peer reviewing (the referee stays anonymous to the author), distribute then to some libraries, now in the digital age we have distribute first, post on the web by the author or his institution's server and referee afterwards. Here it makes no sense to stick with just the one type of anonymous peer-refereeing the publishers offered, but should and will see a full set of refereeing levels (certification levels) including peer referees who may be either anonymous or not. Since the personal anonymous advice to the author to rewrite, say bad english, comes too late to stop distribution anyway, the refereeing needs will be focussing on open annotations, that is the referee signs (as we are use to in mathematics anyhow). Ebs Hilf h...@physnet.uni-oldenburg.de 13.7.2001 On Thu, 12 Jul 2001, Stevan Harnad wrote: On Thu, 12 Jul 2001, Bernard Lang wrote: I noticed that many people on this list seem genuinely afraid of hurting the feelings of publishers. Stevan gave me that impression in our latest exchange, to which I stopped replying because I had the impression that his eagerness to defend publishers (in the classical sense) was hiding facts I did not know about. No hidden facts. Just one very open one. It is possible to free the entire refereed journal corpus online (all 20,000+ journals, all 2,000,000+ articles annually), NOW, without asking or waiting for publishers to do anything at all. http://cogsci.sootn.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm Hence I think it is unnecessary and a waste of time and breath to fulminate against publishers, when there is something much more useful and effective that we could all be doing instead. Moreover, peer review is essential; it is what makes the refereed corpus a REFEREED corpus. Publishers currently implement peer review; it is an essential service; and there is no reason they should nto continue doing it, come what may. So I see absolutely no value in publisher-baiting. It is neither fair nor useful. So, no hidden facts. Complete disclosure. Stevan Harnad har...@cogsci.soton.ac.uk Professor of Cognitive Sciencehar...@princeton.edu Department of Electronics and phone: +44 23-80 592-582 Computer Science fax: +44 23-80 592-865 University of Southampton http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/ Highfield, Southamptonhttp://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/ SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing free access to the refereed journal literature online is available at the American Scientist September Forum (98 99 00 01): http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html You may join the list at the site above. Discussion can be posted to: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@amsci.org
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I support this request. Please answer the questions. Bernard Lang PS I noticed that many people on this list seem genuinely afraid of hurting the feelings of publishers. Stevan gave me that impression in our latest exchange, to which I stopped replying because I had the impression that his eagerness to defend publishers (in the classical sense) was hiding facts I did not know about. So there was really no point in arguing. It is funny. People seem a lot less worried when workers are laid off than when a large corporations are pushed out because the have become economic dinosaures. Why be so concerned with the feelings of corporations, they have none. On Wed, Jul 11, 2001 at 11:26:31AM +0100, Alan Story wrote: Michael: Instead of using emotive words like shame and cynical, perhaps you might address the issues I have raised: a) who is actually doing the giving? b) the free now, charge later philosophy behind this scheme. c) use of non proprietary/open source software for accessing the materials d) financial assistance for academic contributors from countries of the South. To use your own emotive, I just don't see the sacrifice involved. Regards Alan Alan Story Kent Law School University of Kent Canterbury Kent U.K CT2 7NS. a.c.st...@ukc.ac.uk 44 (0)1227 823316 - Original Message - From: Michael Kay k...@osi.hu To: 'Alan Story' a.c.st...@ukc.ac.uk; american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Cc: Istvan Rev rev...@ceu.hu; Anna Maria Balogh abal...@osi.hu Sent: Wednesday, July 11, 2001 11:11 AM Subject: Re: FOS Newsletter Excerpts It is a shame that you should write this in such a cynical tone. Yes the publishers do stand to gain in the long term, but at last they are willing to sacrifice something at least . I have been working with them for some time on exactly these sorts of projects and they do realise that unless they do something to look better that their battle will be even harder. Naturally they are more than concerned about the current debate and their futures. But at the end of the day, they are now coughing with excellent deals for countries that our network serves - the financially disadvantaged. And just for the record not all publishers are inherently evil people - believe it or not. Michael Kay Director eIFL (Soros Foundation Network) http://www.eifl.net Non aux Brevets Logiciels - No to Software Patents SIGNEZhttp://petition.eurolinux.org/SIGN bernard.l...@inria.fr ,_ /\o\o/Tel +33 1 3963 5644 http://pauillac.inria.fr/~lang/ ^ Fax +33 1 3963 5469 INRIA / B.P. 105 / 78153 Le Chesnay CEDEX / France Je n'exprime que mon opinion - I express only my opinion CAGED BEHIND WINDOWS or FREE WITH LINUX
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On Thu, 12 Jul 2001, Bernard Lang wrote: I noticed that many people on this list seem genuinely afraid of hurting the feelings of publishers. Stevan gave me that impression in our latest exchange, to which I stopped replying because I had the impression that his eagerness to defend publishers (in the classical sense) was hiding facts I did not know about. No hidden facts. Just one very open one. It is possible to free the entire refereed journal corpus online (all 20,000+ journals, all 2,000,000+ articles annually), NOW, without asking or waiting for publishers to do anything at all. http://cogsci.sootn.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm Hence I think it is unnecessary and a waste of time and breath to fulminate against publishers, when there is something much more useful and effective that we could all be doing instead. Moreover, peer review is essential; it is what makes the refereed corpus a REFEREED corpus. Publishers currently implement peer review; it is an essential service; and there is no reason they should nto continue doing it, come what may. So I see absolutely no value in publisher-baiting. It is neither fair nor useful. So, no hidden facts. Complete disclosure. Stevan Harnad har...@cogsci.soton.ac.uk Professor of Cognitive Sciencehar...@princeton.edu Department of Electronics and phone: +44 23-80 592-582 Computer Science fax: +44 23-80 592-865 University of Southampton http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/ Highfield, Southamptonhttp://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/ SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing free access to the refereed journal literature online is available at the American Scientist September Forum (98 99 00 01): http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html You may join the list at the site above. Discussion can be posted to: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@amsci.org
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Michael: Instead of using emotive words like shame and cynical, perhaps you might address the issues I have raised: a) who is actually doing the giving? b) the free now, charge later philosophy behind this scheme. c) use of non proprietary/open source software for accessing the materials d) financial assistance for academic contributors from countries of the South. To use your own emotive, I just don't see the sacrifice involved. Regards Alan Alan Story Kent Law School University of Kent Canterbury Kent U.K CT2 7NS. a.c.st...@ukc.ac.uk 44 (0)1227 823316 - Original Message - From: Michael Kay k...@osi.hu To: 'Alan Story' a.c.st...@ukc.ac.uk; american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org Cc: Istvan Rev rev...@ceu.hu; Anna Maria Balogh abal...@osi.hu Sent: Wednesday, July 11, 2001 11:11 AM Subject: Re: FOS Newsletter Excerpts It is a shame that you should write this in such a cynical tone. Yes the publishers do stand to gain in the long term, but at last they are willing to sacrifice something at least . I have been working with them for some time on exactly these sorts of projects and they do realise that unless they do something to look better that their battle will be even harder. Naturally they are more than concerned about the current debate and their futures. But at the end of the day, they are now coughing with excellent deals for countries that our network serves - the financially disadvantaged. And just for the record not all publishers are inherently evil people - believe it or not. Michael Kay Director eIFL (Soros Foundation Network) http://www.eifl.net
Re: FOS Newsletter Excerpts
A few comments on this gift : 1) The giving is actually be done by the authors of the medical journal articles, not the publishers. The publishers are only passing on what they got for free from authors. 2) Such benevolence on the part of publishers! Give away what you get for free and pass it on to others without invoking any extra distribution costs. And then, down the road, when you have a created a market for online journals in third world countries or those countries increase their per capita income, you then start charging them. A roughly similar model is used by Lexis and Westlaw at law schools; while at law school, students get almost unlimited and free access (mind you, the law schools pay a whopping per capita licence fee!) and the students, not surprisingly, get hooked on the wonders of electronic legal research. And then when they become lawyers, the students start charging their clients an hourly rate --- a few years ago it was $75 an hour --- for online legal research. Such fees rapidly pay back the subsidy handed out during law school. And the winners are? Lexis and Westlaw. 3) I assume this benevolence will also include full access to non-proprietary open source software so that these third world universities, to get access to this information, will not have to rely on Microsoft and pay the absolutely scandalous rates that Microsoft charges. Did you know that a rich university such as Harvard pays exactly the same software licensing fees per desk to Microsoft as does the University of Zimbabwe? But then we read that the Gates Foundation is one of the big backers of this benevolence...and we quickly see that this benevolence is all about creating a second market, this for computer software. 4) And finally I assume that this benevolence will also include significant financial assistance so that scholars at third world universities can increase their contributions to these journals and others. The governing assumption behind this project is that scholars and students at third world universities will be merely the consumers of information/ knowledge from the advanced countries, never or seldom the producers. Regards Alan Alan Story Kent Law School University of Kent Canterbury Kent U.K CT2 7NS. a.c.st...@ukc.ac.uk 44 (0)1227 823316
