Guide to the Open Access Movement
Formerly called the Guide to the Free Online Scholarship Movement.
This is a guide to the terminology, acronyms, initiatives, standards, technologies, and players in the open-access or free online scholarship (FOS) movement —the movement to publish scholarly literature on the internet and make it available to readers free of charge and free of unnecessary licensing restrictions.
If you're new to the concept of open access, then see my Open Access Overview. It's designed to be an introduction. This guide, by contrast, is more like a reference work.
The guide has many purposes. It should help you find background on unexplained terms or names you encounter in research on any related topic. For the same reason, it will allow me to use terms and names in my newsletter and blog without explaining each one every time. Above all, it should make it easier for specialists from one sector (such as 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 open-access movement. I hope this guide brings recognition to the contributors and understanding to those hoping to see the big picture.
Having said this, I should emphasize that you needn't see the big picture in order to do useful work that advances the cause. If you did, we wouldn't be as far along as we are.
Using the guide
- To search the guide, wait for the whole file to load and then use the search command on your browser.
- In general I link from acronyms to full names, and put details and descriptions only under the full names. This is awkward for organizations better known by their acronyms than by their full names, but the consistency helps in the long run. I only make exceptions for groups whose full names, though discoverable, are virtually unknown. If you look for a entity under the name known to you, you should find either an entry or a link to one.
- In the entries, links attached to acronyms, names, or words are cross-references which jump to other entries in the guide. Links with their URLs showing jump to outside pages.
- When I can, I keep my descriptions brief and link to web pages for further details. This makes it easier to keep entries up to date.
- So far I have omitted entries for individual people.
- The guide is more complete for the United States and the UK than for other countries. I welcome suggestions that would help me expand the coverage for the rest of the world.
- Unless I'm quoting the usage of others, I prefer "ejournal" to "e-journal" or "eJournal". The same goes for analogous terms like "ebook" and "ecommerce". This is in part a conscious attempt to hasten the domestication of these terms. It was clear that electronic mail was an accepted fact of life, and not a novelty, when it began to be called "email" rather than "e-mail".
| The press of other work has forced me to stop updating this guide. However, I plan to leave it online indefinitely. Please feel free to make use of what's useful here, bearing in mind that it is very far from up to date. For a more recent picture of OA, bridging the gap between this old guide and the present, see my blog, newsletter, and overview.
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I welcome corrections, comments, and suggestions.
Peter Suber
Last revised July 14, 2004.
These links will work only when the corresponding section of the file has loaded, which may take a moment.
A
- AAP. See Association of American Publishers.
- Academic Metadata Format (AMF).
- A proposed metadata standard for academic literature, coded in XML. Intended to do better than the Dublin Core at describing academic content, initially it will be applied to arXiv and RePEc, and will be used by OpCit. Supported by the Open Archives Initiative.
- Home page, http://amf.openlib.org/doc/ebisu.html.
- Académie des Sciences Copyright Statement.
- A public statement from France's Académie des Sciences (December 6, 2001) calling on the European Commission not to apply ordinary copyright rules to scientific publications for which the authors seek no payment. The public statement includes a web form for members of the public to add their signatures.
- Home page, http://www-mathdoc.ujf-grenoble.fr/DA/.
- Advanced Library Collection Management Environment (ALCME).
- A suite of open source tools for library management, including support for repository interfaces, metadata harvesting, and authority control. From OCLC. The ALCME metadata harvesting tools are OAI-compliant.
- Home page, http://alcme.oclc.org/index.html.
- ALCME. See Advanced Library Collection Management Environment.
- ACLS. See American Council of Learned Societies.
- ACRL. See Association of College and Research Libraries.
- ADS. See Astrophysics Data System.
- Advance Online Publication (AOP).
- A policy adopted by most members of the Nature family of print journals in the sciences to post accepted articles to the internet as soon as they are ready. These are the refereed and edited versions of the articles, final in every way except for their pagination. The articles include DOIs and participate in CrossRef. Nature makes abstracts available on its web site free of charge, but limits full-text to paying subscribers. Compare ScienceExpress.
- Nature's AOP FAQ, http://www.nature.com/neuro/aop/.
- AHDS. See Arts and Humanities Data Service.
- ALA. See American Library Association.
- ALM.
- A common abbreviation for Archives, Libraries, and Museums. For example, "ALM institutions" have many common interests in making the transition to the digital age. Sometimes called memory institutions.
- ALPSP. See Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers.
- Amedeo.
- A provider of free online services to support medical research. The services include a medical search engine, weekly emails summarizing recent contents of user-selected journals, personal web pages displaying user-selected abstracts, and overviews of research in the past 12 or 24 months on user-selected topics. Amedeo is funded by pharmaceutical companies.
- Home page, http://amedeo.com/.
- American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS).
- A non-profit federation of American learned societies, primarily in the social sciences and humanities. Among its projects are the History E-Book Project and NINCH.
- Home page, http://www.acls.org/.
- American Library Association (ALA).
- The professional association of American libraries. Important defender of readers' rights to unfiltered and uncensored literature. One of its important divisions is ACRL.
- Home page, http://www.ala.org/.
- American Memory.
- A free online multi-media collection from the Library of Congress. See National Digital Library Program.
- Home page, http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/ammemhome.html.
- AMF. See Academic Metadata Format.
- AOP. See Advance Online Publication.
- Appropriate copy problem.
- The problem of making links from a web page of scholarly resources point to copies of the resources owned or licensed by the user or her institution. The technology for solving this problem is sometimes called local, localized, contextual, or context-sensitive linking.
- ARC. See Cross Archive Searching Service.
- Archive.
- For most FOS initiatives, an archive is simply an open-access collection or repository of digital works of scholarship. Also see Open Archives Initiative and self-archiving.
- Archivelet.
- An archive of an individual scholar's scholarship, as opposed to an archive for an entire institution or discipline. The term was introduced by the makers of Kepler software, which creates archivelets.
- Argos.
- A search engine for free online scholarship and other content in the field of ancient and medieval history. Argos is peer-reviewed in the sense that the items in its index are limited to those which have been accepted by its board of editors. The general editor is Tony Beavers. From Noetic Labs.
- Home page, http://argos.evansville.edu/.
- Ariadne.
- A scholarly journal that often publishes articles on FOS issues.
- Home page, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/.
- Arion.
- An architecture for searching and retrieving digital scientific data, text, and software. From IST (hence CORDIS).
- Home page, http://dlforum.external.forth.gr:8080/
- ARL. See Association of Research Libraries.
- Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS).
- A service to assist scholars in the UK to create and maintain digital collections in the arts and humanities. It supports the Archaeology Data Service, Visual Arts Data Service, Oxford Text Archive, History Data Service, and Performing Arts Data Service. Funded by JISC and the UK Arts and Humanities Research Board.
- Home page, http://ahds.ac.uk/.
- arXiv.
- An OAI-compliant archive of electronic preprints in physics, mathematics, computer science, and non-linear sciences. Created by Paul Ginsparg in 1991, it is one of the oldest archives of free online scholarship. It served as the testbed or first dataset for the Open Citation Project. Funded by the NSF and U.S. Department of Energy. In older literature sometimes called the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) preprint or eprint archive. Sometimes called the Ginsparg archive, and sometimes simply called xxx after the original server name (xxx.lanl.gov). In August 2001 the primary arXiv site moved from Los Alamos to Cornell University.
- Home page http://arXiv.org/.
- Arxiv FAQ, http://www.arxiv.org/help/faq.
- Association of American Publishers (AAP).
- The largest trade association of American book and journal publishers. These for-profit publishers generally resist FOS. One of the sponsors of the DOI standard. Among its other projects is MICI.
- Home page, http://www.publishers.org/index.htm.
- AAP Division of Professional and Scholarly Publishing, http://www.pspcentral.org/.
- Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL).
- A division of the ALA. One of its projects is Create Change.
- Home page, http://www.ala.org/acrl/.
- Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP).
- The professional association of non-profit publishers, especially non-profit academic publishers. It publishes the journal, Learned Publishing.
- Home page, http://www.alpsp.org/.
- Association of Research Libraries (ARL).
- A non-profit association of North American research libraries. One of its priorities is making scholarly literature more affordable. Among its programs are CNI, Create Change, the Directory of Scholarly Electronic Journals and Academic Discussion Lists, the Scholars Portal, and SPARC.
- Home page, http://www.arl.org/.
- Astrophysics Data System (ADS).
- The largest archive of free online abstracts and full-text papers in the sciences. ADS papers are limited to astronomy, astrophysics, planetary sciences, and solar physics. Funded by NASA.
- Home page, http://adswww.harvard.edu/.
- Author Fees.
- One method to subsidize the costs of free online access to scholarship (i.e. without charging readers). If a journal has already accepted an article on the merits, then it might charge the author a fee to make the article freely available online. At some print journals, this is optional; if authors choose not to pay the fee, their article appears only in print. At some online journals, the fee is required.
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B
- Benton Foundation.
- A philanthropic organization funding projects to bridge the digital divide.
- Home page, http://www.benton.org/.
- bepress. See Berkeley Electronic Press.
- Berkeley Electronic Press (bepress).
- A publisher of free online scholarly journals. Bepress journals leave copyright in the hands of authors and are usually peer-reviewed. Their production and management are facilitated by bepress software which handles every step of the process for authors, editors, and reviewers. The software not only keeps costs down but also makes it easy for the press to launch new journals. The bepress software is compatible with eprints software, and hence makes it possible to integrate a scholarly journal with an OAI-compliant archive. In October 2001 bepress entered a partnership with CDL to make its software available to researchers associated with the University of California.
- Home page, http://www.bepress.com/.
- bepress FAQ, http://www.bepress.com/faq.html.
- BIND. See Biomolecular Interaction Network Database.
- Bioline (BL).
- A non-profit publisher of free and affordable online biomedical journals containing research from developing countries such as Brazil, Cuba, India, Indonesia, Kenya, South Africa, Uganda, and Zimbabwe. From the University of Toronto Libraries and Brazil's Reference Center on Environmental Information.
- Home page, http://www.bioline.org.br.
- BioMed Central.
- A publisher of peer reviewed electronic journals in biology and medicine. Although it is a for-profit publisher, it provides free online access to all its research articles. Starting in 2002, authors will be charged processing fees, although these will be waived for authors from developing countries and in some other circumstances. Authors always retain the copyright to their articles. BioMed Central produces annual print editions for archival purposes, one for biology and one for medicine, and may eventually produce one for each of its journals. All articles published by BioMed Central are deposited with PubMed Central, where they are also available, and the company actively encourags others, such as national libraries, to incorporate all or a subset of the articles in their permanent archives. A member of the Current Science Group.
- Home page, http://www.biomedcentral.com/.
- BioMed Central FAQ, http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/faq.asp.
- Biomolecular Interaction Network Database (BIND).
- Free online database of research papers on protein interaction in humans and other animals. The purpose is to accelerate the development of new medicines. Run by Blueprint, a non-profit organization funded by IBM and a handful of Canadian medical institutes.
- Home page, http://www.bind.ca/.
- Blueprint, http://137.82.44.24/.
- BioOne.
- A growing collection of online, full-text, peer-reviewed journals in biology. Access is not free. Most are electronic versions of journals which previously appeared only in print. BioOne supports reference linking, article DOIs, cross-journal searching, and email alerts for new issues of any participating journal. BioOne contents are archived by OCLC. BioOne is run by the non-profit BioOne Corporation, which is jointly governed by the American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS), SPARC, the University of Kansas, the Big 12 Plus Libraries Consortium, and Allen Press.
- Home page, http://www.bioone.org/.
- BioOne FAQ, http://www.bioone.org/bioone/?request=get-help-faq.
- Bireme.
- "Latin American and Caribbean Center on Health Sciences Information." A Brazilian foundation dedicated to free and affordable access to health information. It supports online health initiatives throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. Among its projects are the Declaration of Havana, the Declaration of San José, Project InfoMed, SciELO, and the Virtual Health Library. Bireme is one of the regional centers of MedLine. Funded by the government of Brazil, the Federal University of São Paulo, Human Development Program, the Pan American Health Organization, and the World Health Organization.
- Home page, http://www.bireme.br/bvs/bireme/I/homepage.htm.
- BL. See Bioline.
- BlueSky.
- A software suite to streamline every aspect of producing a scholarly journal, either for print, for CD, or for the internet. The goal is to make the production costs so low that producers can subsidize the journal and offer it to readers free of charge. BlueSky can generate OAI metadata for the journals it produces.
- Home page, http://www.blueskyscholars.com/
- BMC. See BioMed Central.
- BOAI. See Budapest Open Access Initiative.
- Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI).
- A public statement in support of open access for scholarly journal articles, and an interactive web site through which individual and institutional supporters of the cause can add their signatures (officially launched February 14, 2002). The initiative endorses two strategies for achieving FOS. The first is self-archiving. The second is the launch of a new generation of FOS journals committed to open access, and assistance to established journals willing to make the transition to open access. The statement arose from a December 2001 meeting in Budapest, hosted by the Open Society Institute (OSI). One purpose of the BOAI is to persuade foundations and other organizations to donate resources (money, hardware, software, training) to the cause, a campaign in which OSI led by example. (Full disclosure: I was a participant in the Budapest meeting and one of the original signatories.)
- Home page, http://www.soros.org/openaccess/.
- The BOAI FAQ, http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm.
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C
- CAPM. See Comprehensive Access to Printed Materials.
- CDL. See California Digital Library.
- California Digital Library (CDL).
- The digital library for the ten campuses of the University of California, and an organization to help researchers develop new tools for the electronic dissemination of scholarly research. Among its projects are eScholarship and a partnership with bepress.
- Home page, http://www.cdlib.org/.
- CDL FAQ, http://www.cdlib.org/about/faq/.
- Campaign for the Freedom of Distribution of Scientific Work.
- An early (1998-2000) FOS initiative from Stefano Ghirlanda. The campaign focused on lessening the restrictions of copyright agreements for scientific literature. Also called the Free Science Campaign.
- Home page, http://ethology.intercult.su.se/freescience/.
- Canadian Electronic Scholarly Network (CESN).
- A network of support and communication for Canadian electronic journals. It also provides a web presence for the Electronic Publishing Promotion Project (although the EPPP also has its own web site).
- Home page, http://www.schoolnet.ca/vp-pv/cesn/e/.
- Catchword.
- Producer of electronic journals for print publishers. Generally the Catchword journals are not available free of charge. However, for every journal it produces Catchword supports free current awareness for tables of contents. Currently it produces over 1,100 electronic journals.
- Home page, http://www.catchword.com/.
- CCIP. See Coalition for Public Information (Coalition Canadienne de L'Information Publique).
- CDI. See Content Directions, Inc.
- CDLR. See Centre for Digital Library Research.
- CEDARS. See CURL Exemplars for Digital Archives.
- Centre for Digital Library Research (CDLR).
- A research center at the University of Strathclyde. Among its projects is INSPIRAL (more below).
- Home page, http://cdlr.strath.ac.uk/.
- See the CDLR's long list of projects, http://cdlr.strath.ac.uk/projects/projects.html.
- Center for the Public Domain.
- A philanthropic organization funding projects to enhance America's "commons" or public domain, including free digital content and efforts to counteract recent trends in copyright and patent law. Among its projects is ibiblio.
- Home page, http://www.centerforthepublicdomain.org/.
- CESN. See Canadian Electronic Scholarly Network.
- cIDf. See Content ID Forum.
- Cite-Base Search.
- A search engine for OAI-compliant archives. It also reveals the citation impact of the papers in its index. From Tim Brody and OpCit.
- Home page, http://citebase.eprints.org/.
- CiteSeer.
- Former name of ResearchIndex.
- CLIR. See Council on Library and Information Resources.
- CNI. See Coalition for Networked Information.
- CNRI. See Corporation for National Research Initiatives.
- Coalition for Networked Information (CNI).
- A coalition of 200+ member organizations dedicated to improving scholarly communication and productivity. Many of its projects address the economics and technology of the infrastructure of networked scholarly communication. Among its programs is NINCH. CNI is a program of ARL and Educause.
- Home page, http://www.cni.org/.
- Coalition for Public Information (CPI).
- A coalition of public interest organizations "whose mandate is to foster universal access to affordable, useable information and communications services and technology". Founded in 1993 as part of the Ontario Library Association and spun off as a separate organization in 1996, it has apparently been inactive since 1999. The French name is Coalition Canadienne de L'Information Publique (CCIP). Sometimes the organization is known by the dual English-French acronym, CPI-CCIP.
- Home page, http://www.canarie.ca/cpi/.
- CogPrints.
- An OAI-compliant eprint archive for the field of cognitive science. It developed and now oversees the eprints archiving software. Funded by JISC as part of its eLib program.
- Home page, http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/.
- Community Research and Development Information Service (CORDIS).
- A service from the European Union to provide free online access to EU-funded research. Among its programs are eContent and FP5 with all its many subsidiary programs.
- Home page, http://www.cordis.lu/en/home.html.
- Comprehensive Access to Printed Materials (CAPM).
- A project from the Johns Hopkins University library to use robotics, telecommunications, scanners, and special software to allow web-based browsing of a library collection of printed works shelved at an off-campus storage facility. Funded by the Mellon Foundation and the Minolta Corporation.
- Home page, http://dkc.mse.jhu.edu/CAPM/.
- Consortium of University Research Libraries (CURL).
- A consortium of UK research libraries dedicated to the improvement of libraries and their resources for learning and research. Among its projects is CEDARS.
- Home page, http://www.curl.ac.uk/.
- Contemporary Culture Virtual Archives in XML (COVAX).
- A free online archive of contemporary European culture, and a project to create an interoperable network of archives of primary sources in the history of European culture and science. COVAX will operate a cross-archive metasearch engine over distributed native XML databases. Funded by the European Commission through IST.
- Home page, http://www.covax.org.
- Content Directions, Inc. (CDI).
- A DOI registration agency. This means that it can assign DOI prefixes to publishers, register DOIs, and facilitate the creation and revision of metadata associated with a DOI. Also a consultant to publishers on how they can best use the DOI system. Among its projects is MICI.
- Home page, http://www.contentdirections.com/.
- Content ID Forum (cIDf).
- A non-profit organization to promote Content ID, a metadata standard for identifying digital contents for the purposes of electronic commerce. cIDf is working with IDF to harmonize the Content ID standard with the DOI standard.
- Home page, http://www.cidf.org/.
- Contextual linking.
- Links on a web page that take users to the appropriate copies of the resources listed on the page, e.g. giving preference to copies stored locally at the user's institution or for which the user's institution has bought licenses. Also called local, localized, or context-sensitive linking. For one technology to provide contextual linking, see OpenURL.
- CORDIS. See Community Research and Development Information Service
- Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI).
- A non-profit corporation doing research for the public interest into network-based information technologies. Among its projects are D-Lib Magazine, the DOI initiative, and the National Digital Library Program.
- Home page, http://www.cnri.reston.va.us/.
- Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR).
- An association devoted to the long-term accessibility of scholarly literature. It sponsors programs in preserving literature, making it affordable, and helping to create and support new forms of digital electronic literature. One of its programs is DLF.
- Home page, http://www.clir.org/.
- COVAX. See Contemporary Culture Virtual Archives in XML.
- CPI. See Coalition for Public Information.
- The Craft.
- A scholarly journal that publishes articles on FOS-related topics. Its subtitle: Evolving the Art and Science of Electronic Scholarly Publication.
- Home page, http://www.icaap.org/TheCraft/.
- Create Change.
- A collection of strategies for librarians and researchers to protest high subscription prices for scholarly journals and to assist journals in finding publishing options better suited to their academic missions. From ARL, ACRL, and SPARC as part of the Declaring Independence campaign.
- Home page, http://www.createchange.org/home.html.
- Cross Archive Search Engine.
- A search engine that indexes data stored in more than one database or archive. This allows dividing the labor of maintaining the separate archives (among independent groups organized by subject expertise or regional authority), scaling up to include relevant new archives as they emerge, and freeing users from the need to run separate searches across the separate archives.
- Cross Archive Searching Service (ARC).
- A cross-archive search engine for OAI-compliant archives. From the Digital Library Research group of Old Dominion University.
- Home page, http://arc.cs.odu.edu/.
- CrossRef.
- A non-profit corporation working to to automate reference linking across publishers, i.e. to link bibliographic and footnote citations to full-text sources. CrossRef is the first and so far the only complete application of the DOI system. CrossRef aims to interlink all online scholarship. Operated by PILA. Launched in June 2000. Now also a DOI registration agency.
- Home page, http://www.crossref.org/.
- Starting in January 2002, CrossRef was compatible with SFX. This means that at sites using both technologies, the reference links provided by CrossRef will take the user's licenses into account as determined by SFX. This solves the appropriate copy problem for reference links.
- CSG. See Current Science Group.
- Cultivate Interactive.
- A scholarly journal which occasionally covers FOS issues. Funded by Digicult and UKOLN.
- Home page, http://www.cultivate-int.org/.
- CURL. See Consortium of University Research Libraries.
- CURL Exemplars for Digital Archives (CEDARS).
- A project to develop strategies for the long-term preservation of digital content. It will produce guidelines, demonstration projects to test the guidelines, and economic analysis of implementing the guidelines. Uses OAIS. From CURL with funding from JISC as part of its eLib program.
- Home page, http://www.leeds.ac.uk/cedars/.
- CURL page on CEDARS, http://www.curl.ac.uk/projects/cedars.html.
- Current awareness.
- Notification when something of interest happens at an information source. Nowadays current awareness tends to be automated and use email. For example, online journals can provide email notification that new issues have been published, or they can provide tables of contents, full-text articles, or updated results to stored searches. Some journals offer current awareness to the public at no charge, while others limit it to paying subscribers. Some print journals with no free online content offer free, automated current awareness.
- Current Science Group (CSG).
- A group of independent companies collaborating to publish and distribute information in the biomedical sciences. Among its members is BioMed Central.
- Home page, http://www.current-science-group.com/.
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D
- D3E. See Digital Document Discourse Environment.
- D-Lib Magazine.
- A scholarly journal occasionally covering FOS issues. Hosted by CNRI and sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as part of the Digital Libraries Initiative.
- Home page, http://www.dlib.org/.
- DC. See Dublin Core.
- DCMI. See Dublin Core Metadata Initiative.
- DDC. See Directory of Digital Collections.
- Declaration of Havana.
- Full title: Declaration of Havana Towards Equitable Access to Health Information. A statement issued in Havana on April 27, 2001, by the participants in the Second Regional Coordination Meeting of the Virtual Health Library and the Fifth Regional Congress on Health Sciences Information from Bireme. One of the strongest public statements in support of FOS. It opens with the principle that "scientific-technical information is a global public good essential for social development, and...[its] universal and equitable dissemination should be assured by national and international public policies." Another section asserts that "the unjust, unnecessary and avoidable" health differences among individuals and groups are due in part to "inequitable access to health information and knowledge". The remedy for both health inequalities and poverty is political participation, which in turn depends on "access to information and communication". One purpose of the declaration is to marshal support for the Virtual Health Library. Also see the Declaration of San José.
- Home page, http://www.bireme.br/crics5/I/declara.htm
- Declaration of San José.
- Full title: Declaration of San José Towards the Virtual Health Library. A statement issued in San José, Costa Rica, on March 27, 1998, by the delegates of the Latin American and Caribbean System on Health Sciences Information (Bireme). The statement asserts that "access to information" is one of the "essential elements" of health, well-being, equity of living conditions, and development. The signatories pledged to create the Virtual Health Library. Also see the Declaration of Havana.
- Home page, http://www.bireme.br/bvs/por/ideclar.htm.
- Declaring Independence.
- A campaign to inform journal editors of their publishing options, and to help them move to an option which will best serve their academic mission. In practice, this means moving from a publisher charging high subscription prices to one charging significantly less. It often means moving from print to the internet. The campaign consists of a handbook and a web site, Create Change. Sponsored by SPARC and the Triangle Research Libraries Network.
- Home page, http://www.arl.org/sparc/DI/.
- See my list of known examples of journals declaring independence, http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/lists.htm#declarations.
- Deep Internet.
- That portion of the internet stored in online databases. Also called the invisible internet. These pages are "invisible" in the sense that they are not crawled by standard search engines, but they are quite visible to their own search engines which may well be accessible on the web to all users. Without special software, then, separate databases must be searched separately. By some estimates, the deep internet is 500 times larger than the surface internet. Many scholarly archives lie in the deep internet.
- DELOS. See Network of Excellence on Digital Libraries.
- Developing Nations Initiatives.
- A list of projects to disseminate free or affordable scholarly journals to, or from, developing countries, or both. Maintained by Ann Okerson for the LibLicense (Licensing Digital Information) discussion list.
- Home page, http://www.library.yale.edu/~llicense/develop.shtml.
- Diffuse Project.
- A continuously updated compendium of evolving standards for the exchange of information, and guides to their application. Funded by IST (hence CORDIS), and implemented by TIEKE (Finnish Information Society Development Centre), IC Focus, and The SGML Centre.
- Home page, http://www.diffuse.org/.
- List of organizations promulgating standards, http://www.diffuse.org/fora.html.
- List of the standards themselves, http://www.diffuse.org/standards.html.
- Digicult. See Digital Heritage and Cultural Content.
- DigiNews.
- A bimonthly newsletter that frequently publishes FOS-related news. From RLG.
- Home page, http://www.rlg.org/preserv/diginews/.
- Digital Divide.
- The disparity between the rich and the poor in their access to computers, digital information, and the benefits these make possible. To see why this is relevant to FOS, let's distinguish the hardware and software versions of the digital divide. The hardware problem is to get computers and telephone lines (or wireless infrastructure) to the under-served parts of the world. The software problem is to get content, including academic content, online and free of charge so that it will be accessible to those who succeed in solving the hardware problem. The FOS movement is largely about widening access to scholarly literature. While the FOS movement addresses the academic part of the software problem, those working to bridge the digital divide are addressing the hardware problem.
- Major players addressing the hardware problem include the Benton Foundation and the DOT Force.
- Digital Document Discourse Environment (D3E).
- An open source tool for peer review and commentary. It creates a threaded discussion attached to any web page. "Full D3E" uses a toolkit to insert navigation links and discussion hooks into the target document. "Ubiquitous D3E" uses unmodified files in their natural habitat on the web. D3E discussions support multiple threads, moderators, discussion subscription, searching, email delivery, HTML within posts, look and feel control, usage statistics, and other standard features of major discussion forums. D3E is a collaboration of the Knowledge Media Institute of the UK's Open University and the Center for LifeLong Learning & Design of the University of Colorado at Boulder.
- Home page, http://d3e.open.ac.uk/.
- Digital Heritage and Cultural Content (Digicult).
- One of the major program areas of IST (hence CORDIS). Among its projets are Cultivate Interactive and METAe.
- Home page, http://www.cordis.lu/ist/ka3/digicult/home.html.
- Digital Information in the Information Research Field.
- A comprehensive index of free online sources of information and research in the fields of information management, information science, and information systems. Maintained by Tom Wilson.
- Home page, http://informationr.net/fr/freejnls.html.
- Digital Libraries Initiative (DLI).
- An initiative coordinated by several federal agencies to provide research and technology for the next generation of digital libraries. DLI is now in Phase 2. Phase 1 lasted from 1994 to 1998. Sponsored by National Science Foundation, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), National Library of Medicine, the Library of Congress, National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
- Home page, http://www.dli2.nsf.gov/.
- The Library of Congress page on the DLI, http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/dli2/index.html
- Digital Library Federation (DLF).
- An association of research libraries dedicated to creating, maintaining, expanding, and preserving digital online scholarship. Operated by CLIR. One of its projects is to assist the Library of Congress with the National Digital Library Program. Among its other projects is METS.
- Home page, http://www.clir.org/diglib/dlfhomepage.htm.
- Digital Object Identifier (DOI).
- A permanent identifying number for an online journal, article, image, citation, applet, script, or other digital "object". Because it identifies the object, it differs from a URL, which identifies the object's location, and it remains the same even when the object's URL changes. DOIs are for online content roughly what ISBNs are for books. To be more precise, the DOI includes an identifying number, associated metadata, and a system to deliver the digital object to users who know or click on its identifying number.
- The International DOI Foundation (IDF) maintains a directory connecting DOIs with URLs and other metadata. The DOI standard includes syntax for turning a DOI into a URL pointing to the object's directory entry, which will redirect the user to the object's current location on the web. Those who hold intellectual property rights in online objects control the DOIs of those objects. If users link to documents through their DOIs, and if publishers update the DOI directory when their documents move, then links don't die and objects have (in effect) permanent URLs.
- DOIs are translated or "resolved" into URLs by the Handle System created by CNRI. Recently DOIs became capable of multiple resolution. Users who click on a DOI link supporting multiple resolution are shown a pop-up menu of eligible destinations, which could include locations of various copies of the object, online stores selling the object, free excerpts of documents available in full-text only for pay, the object's metadata file, or other pertinent information.
- Every participating publisher has a unique number called its "prefix" used in its DOIs. Acquiring a prefix from a DOI registration agency is not free, but is a one-time charge. Readers use DOIs free of charge, but need a free browser plug-in to resolve DOIs.
- A DOI "registration agency" can assign a prefix to a publisher, register DOIs, and provide the infrastructure used by publishers to modify the metadata associated with a DOI. The International DOI Foundation was the only registration agency for some time, but now there are others. See Content Directions, CrossRef, Enpia Systems, and Learning Objects Network.
- Created by the AAP, IPA, STM, and CNRI, and now administered by the IDF. Governance is open; any interested party may join the IDF and particpate. Now part of the wider INDECS initiative. The official DOI standard has been issued by NISO.
- DOIs underlie the CrossRef service, which provides automatic reference linking (interlinking citations to the sources they cite).
- Home page, http://www.doi.org/index.html.
- DOI FAQ, http://www.doi.org/faq.html.
- Browser plug-in for resolving DOIs, http://www.handle.net/resolver/index.html.
- Digital Opportunity Task Force (DOT Force).
- An international organization devoted to closing the digital divide. Sponsored by the United Nations Develpment Program and the World Bank.
- Home page, http://www.dotforce.org/.
- Digital Preservation Commons (DPC).
- A joint project OCLC and RLG designed to identify and support the best methods for the long-term preservation of digital texts, especially those in large heterogeneous archives of research papers.
- Home page, http://www.oclc.org/digitalpreservation/.
- Digital Promise Project.
- A proposal to create an $18 billion endowment for technology, training, and online digital content to enhance education in the United States. The money would come from the sale of certain bands of radio spectrum.
- Home page, http://www.digitalpromise.org/.
- Digital Rights Management (DRM).
- Software that stands between online information and requesting users. If users meet the program's criteria (e.g. they are paying subscribers), then it will allow them secure access to the information. For other users, it will block access. DRM technology can take many approaches, including encryption, user-identifying metadata, and plug-ins for the user's browser.
- Directory of Digital Collections (DDC).
- A search engine aspiring to cover all the digitized cultural heritage collections in the world. New collections may add themselves through a link at the site. Sponsored by UNESCO's Memory of the World program and IFLA.
- Home page, http://thoth.bl.uk/.
- Directory of Scholarly Electronic Journals and Academic Discussion Lists.
- A large directory of online scholarly content. From ARL. Not free.
- Home page, http://arl.cni.org/scomm/edir/.
- Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER).
- A growing collection of electronic scholarship from many sources. DNER is concerned with quality, access, preservation, and price. While DNER wants scholarly journals to be digital and available over the internet, it does not require that they be free, only affordable. Limited to the UK. Among its projects are EBONI and RDN. Funded by JISC.
- Home page, http://www.jisc.ac.uk/dner/.
- DNER FAQ, http://www.jisc.ac.uk/dner/information/faqs.html.
- DLF. See Digital Library Federation.
- DLI. See Digital Libraries Initiative.
- DNER. See Distributed National Electronic Resource.
- DOI. See Digital Object Identifier.
- DOT Force. See Digital Opportunity Task Force.
- DP9.
- 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 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.
- Home page, http://arc.cs.odu.edu:8080/dp9/index.jsp.
- DPC. See Digital Preservation Commons.
- DRM. See Digital Rights Management.
- DSpace.
- An online digital archive for the roughly 10,000 scholarly articles, images, and digital objects produced each year by the faculty and researchers of MIT. The archive contents will be available free of charge, usually to the whole world, although authors will have the right to limit access to MIT users. Preprints may also become inaccessible after they have been submitted or published elsewhere. The planners hope to make all the code creating the site open source, although in the short term they may have to use some closed modules licensed from others. Funded by Hewlett-Packard. What sets DSpace apart from other archives is the commitment to capture all the (faculty) intellectual output of an institution, and the corporate partnership which does not introduce fees for users.
- Home page, http://web.mit.edu/dspace/.
- DSpace FAQ, http://web.mit.edu/dspace/live/about_us/faqs/index.html. (Unusually clear and candid.)
- Dublin Core (DC).
- One of the oldest and most widely accepted international metadata standards. Dublin Core metadata can describe both electronic and non-electronic resources. Named for the 1995 conference in Dublin, Ohio (not Dublin, Ireland), where it was first elaborated. The conference was hosted by OCLC and NCSA. The evolution of the standard is now supervised by the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative. The standard was approved by American National Standards Institute (ANSI) in October 2001.
- The closest thing to a Dublin Core home page is that for the DCMI, http://dublincore.org/.
- DC metadata can be generated "by hand" or by software. For web-based software to generate DC metadata for a web page, see UKOLN's DC Dot, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/dcdot/.
- See the DCMI's long list of the projects using the Dublin Core, http://uk.dublincore.org/projects/.
- Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI).
- A non-profit organization developing metadata standards to facilitate resource discovery, and promoting the adoption of interoperable metadata standards.
- Home page, http://dublincore.org/.
- The DCMI FAQ, http://uk.dublincore.org/resources/faq/.
-
E
- E-Biomed.
- A free online archive for the biomedical fields proposed in 1999 by Harold Varmus. It would contain both unrefereed preprints and refereed postprints. Peer review would be done by E-Biomed editorial boards. Copyrights would be retained by authors on condition that authors consent to the free distribution of their works. The system would be managed by a Governing Board on which all stakeholders would have a seat: researchers, editors, computer specialists, and funding agencies. The idea came to life only some time after (February 2000) the name was changed (August 30, 1999) to PubMed Central, and only with some important changes, such as dropping preprints.
- The former E-Biomed home page now simply redirects users to PubMed Central.
- Here is the paper in which Varmus proposed E-Biomed, http://www.nih.gov/about/director/pubmedcentral/ebiomedarch.htm.
- Here's a paper by Rob Kling on the evolution of E-Biomed into PubMed Central, http://www.slis.indiana.edu/csi/WP/wp01-03B.html.
- EAN. See European Archival Network.
- EBONI. See Electronic Books On-Screen Interface.
- ebook.
- An electronic book. Its text may be available on the web, on a disk or CD, or in a downloadable file for an ebook reader.
- ebrary.
- A publisher of electronic scholarship. It creates partnerships with academic print publishers, including university presses, and makes their works available online in PDF format. Users may browse or read these online editions free of charge, but must pay to download or print them. They may highlight as much or as little as they wish to download or print, and then are charged at "photocopying rates" (about 25 cents per page). The ASCII version of the content can be crawled by search engines so that it is freely searchable. Founded in February 1999 by Christopher Warnock and Kevin Sayar.
- Home page, http://www.ebrary.com/.
- EBSCO.
- EBSCO is an acronym for the Elton B. Stephens Company, but the company is never called by its full name. A publisher of electronic books, journals, and databases in many academic fields. Also includes EBSCO Net (serials management system), EBSCO Online (e-journal access and management), EBSCO Host (online bibliographic and full-text database using CrossRef), and EBSCO Books (online book procurement service). Almost none of this is available free of charge. However, among its projects is EIFL Direct.
- Home page of EBSCO Publishing, http://www.epnet.com/.
- EBSCO Information Services, http://www-us.ebsco.com/home/default.asp.
- eContent.
- An initiative to produce and disseminate online European digital content in many languages. From CORDIS.
- Home page, http://www.cordis.lu/econtent/.
- Educause.
- An international non-profit organization dedicated to the use of information resources and technology to transform teaching and research. One of the two sponsors, with ARL, of CNI.
- Home page, http://www.educause.edu/.
- eIFL Direct. See Electronic Information for Libraries Direct.
- ejournal.
- An electronic journal. Its text may be available on the web, on a disk or CD, or in a downloadable file for an ebook reader.
- Electronic Books On-Screen Interface (EBONI).
- A research project into the most effective use of hyperlinks, tables of contents, indices, graphics, frames, tables, color, and other navigation aids and organizational structures, for the purpose of teaching and learning. Funded by JISC as part of DNER.
- Home page, http://eboni.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/.
- Electronic Information for Libraries Direct (eIFL Direct).
- A program launched in 1999 to subsidize access to online scholarly journals in 39 countries from the former Soviet bloc, Africa, and Latin America. The journals come from five EBSCO databases, and the subsidies from George Soros' Open Society Institute. The program encompasses over 5,000 full-text journals, and serves over 2,000 libraries and research institutions. The most indigent institutions have free access, while others pay greatly reduced prices. Initially the program focused on journals in the humanities, social sciences, education, business, and law, but has since expanded to cover STM journals as well. With some justice it calls itself the largest information consortium in the world. eIFL is to become an independent foundation in 2002, funded by OSI and additional agencies still being sought. OSI is explicit that the problem eIFL solves is partly caused by political repression and partly by exorbitant subscription prices charged by for-profit publishers.
- Home page, http://www.eifl.net/.
- eIFL FAQ, http://soros.epnet.com/eifl_description.html.
- Electronic Publishers Coalition (EPC).
- A trade association of ebook publishers. However, it will surprise you. For example, unlike the AAP, the EPC condemned the use of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act to prosecute Dmitry Sklyarov (July 2001) for writing software to bypass the copy protection on Adobe ebooks.
- Home page, http://www.epccentral.org/index.html.
- Electronic Publishing Promotion Project (EPPP).
- An initiative to produce home-grown, electronic, non-profit, scholarly journals in Canada. Part of Industry Canada's SchoolNet project.
- Home page, http://www.schoolnet.ca/vp-pv/cesn/e/eppp.htm.
- Electronic Publishing Trust for Development (EPT).
- A England-based trust established in 1996 to promote free online access to scientific literature, especially in biomedicine. Its main focus is to help bring the world's research literature to developing countries and to bring literature from developing countries to the rest of the world.
- Home page, http://www.epublishingtrust.org/
- Electronic Society for Social Scientists (ELSSS).
- A non-profit society dedicated to the production of low-cost electronic scholarly journals in the social sciences, particularly in economics. Its journals are not free, but they do pay authors and referees, let authors keep the copyright in their articles, and give subscriptions free to libraries in developing countries.
- Home page, http://www.elsss.org.uk/.
- Electronic Libraries Programme (eLib).
- A publicly funded effort in the UK to develop an electronic library to serve higher education. Among its projects are CEDARS, CogPrints, HEADLINE, HEDS, the Open Journal Project, and the SuperJournal Project. A program of JISC.
- Home page, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/.
- eLib. See Electronic Libraries Programme.
- ELSSS. See Electronic Society for Social Scientists.
- Embargo Policies.
- Rules adopted by a journal about what kinds of prior publication, publicity, or internet presence will disqualify a submitted paper for consideration. See Ingelfinger Rule.
- Enpia Systems.
- A DOI registration agency. This means that it can assign DOI prefixes to publishers, register DOIs, and facilitate the creation and revision of metadata associated with a DOI.
- Home page, http://www.enpia.com/.
- EPC. See Electronic Publishers Coalition.
- EPPP. See Electronic Publishing Promotion Project.
- Eprint.
- An electronic preprint or postprint. The term "e-print" (with the hyphen) was coined in 1992 by Greg Lawler, and originally referred only to electronic preprints. Paul Ginsparg later generalized it to mean author self-archived electronic preprints or postprints.
- Eprint Archiving.
- Another term for self-archiving.
- eprints.
- Free software to create an empty OAI-compliant archive to be filled with content by an individual scholar or institution. Written by Rob Tansley and later upgraded and maintained by Chris Gutteridge. Based on the CogPrints software, which was written by Matt Hemus and redesigned and made OAI-compliant by Rob Tansley. Both the eprints and CogPrints programs were written according to specs laid down by Stevan Harnad. Originally supported by CogPrints but now supported by JISC as part of the Open Citation Project and by NSF.
- Home page, http://www.eprints.org/.
- Discussion forum for eprints users, http://community.eprints.org/phpBB/.
- Review of eprints based on an eight month test at CalTech, http://www.arl.org/sparc/core/index.asp?page=g20#6.
- EPT. See Electronic Publishing Trust for Development.
- ERCIM. See European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics.
- eScholarship.
- An initiative to facilitate scholar-led innovations in scholarly communication. eScholarship promotes free online disciplinary archives, software tools for the submission, peer-review, access, and discovery of scholarly articles, and new services to accompany the archives, such as alerting, citation, and annotation services. eScholarship's online archives are built with the eprints software and are all OAI-compliant.
A project of the University of California's CDL, with additional funding from SPARC.
- Home page, http://escholarship.cdlib.org/.
- ETD-MS. See Interoperability Metadata Standard for Electronic Theses and Dissertations.
- European Archival Network (EAN).
- Hosts and provides searching services for cultural heritage archives from 49 European countries, as well as some archives elsewhere.
- Home page, http://www.european-archival.net/.
- European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM).
- An international organization whose mission is to foster cooperation among European researchers and collaboration between them and industry. One of its projects is DELOS.
- Home page, http://www.ercim.org/.
- Ex Libris.
- Producer of automated library systems, for example SFX and OpenURL.
- Home page, http://www.exlibris-usa.com/.
- Ex Libris.
- A portal to special library collections provided the collections are accessible on the web free of charge. Founded in 1991.
- Home page, http://www.exlib.org/.
- Extensible Mark-up Language (XML).
- A mark-up language for indicating the kinds of information in a text. Relevant to FOS because it is a natural language for coding metadata. It can facilitate information discovery and retrieval, document printing and display in a wide variety of formats, and (for this reason) digital preservation.
- The W3C page on XML, http://www.w3.org/XML/.
- The Diffuse page on XML, http://www.diffuse.org/xmlguide.html.
- Northern Light page on XML, http://special.northernlight.com/xml/
- The OASIS page on XML, http://www.oasis-open.org/cover/.
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F
- FP5. See Fifth Framework Programme.
- FP6. See Sixth Framework Programme.
- FAQ. See Frequently Asked Questions.
- Faustian Bargain.
- Stevan Harnad's term for the pact authors had to make with publishers in the era of print, namely, to let publishers charge access tolls for the author's work in exchange for publishing it at all. In the print era, Harnad argues, this was only justified because it was necessary. In the digital era, it is not necessary and therefore not justified. See Harnad's description of the bargain and its alternative, http://www.arl.org/scomm/subversive/sub01.html.
- Fifth Framework Programme (FP5).
- A program to conduct research and technological development funded by the European Union. Among its projects are METAe and IST. From CORDIS. The Sixth Framework Programme is now being developed.
- Home page, http://www.cordis.lu/fp5/home.html.
- FirstSearch.
- A unified front end to 75+ academic databases, from OCLC. Many but not all of the participating databases are also produced by OCLC. Not free.
- Home page, http://newfirstsearch.oclc.org/.
- FirstSearch FAQ, http://www.oclc.org/firstsearch/faq/index.htm.
- FMJ. See Free Medical Journals.
- FOS. See Free Online Scholarship.
- Free Medical Journals.
- A web site collecting links to medical journals that offer their contents online free of charge. In addition to linking to free online medical journals, the site classsifies them by the lag time between print publication and free online access (no lag time, one year, two years, etc.), and by language. It also sorts them within each category by impact factors. Maintained by Bernd Sebastian Kamps.
- Home page, http://www.freemedicaljournals.com/.
- Kamps' strong pro-FOS statement of FMJ's philosophy, http://www.freemedicaljournals.com/htm/phil.htm. (Kamps is also the senior editor of Amedeo.)
- Free Online Scholarship (FOS).
- I use this as the generic term for scholarly literature in the sciences or humanities available free of charge on the internet. I turned to a new term only reluctantly because there was no general term already accepted for this kind of literature, although since the launch of the Budapest Open Access Initiative (2/14/02), the term open access has spread widely. "FOS" can also be used as an adjective, as in "FOS initiatives" and "FOS issues". See the FOS Newsletter.
- One person's more detailed elaboration of FOS, http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/index.htm#editorial.
- FOS Timeline, http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/timeline.htm. Chronology of major events in the FOS movement.
- Free Online Scholarship Newsletter.
- An informal newsletter on developments in the migration of print scholarship to the internet, efforts to make online scholarship accessible to readers free of charge, and other FOS issues. Published sporadically by Peter Suber.
- Home page, http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/.
- FOS News blog, http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html. A weblog of FOS news, taking over some of the load from the FOS Newsletter.
- Free Science Campaign. See Campaign for the Freedom of Distribution of Scientific Work.
- Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ).
- A list of common questions and their answers, to save time for both the questioner and the answerer. There is no single FAQ for the FOS movement, but here are some of major compilations of questions and answers, or objections and replies.
- The Budapest Open Access Initiative FAQ, http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm. While this FAQ addresses only one initiative, it covers much of the FOS movement. (Full disclosure: I helped write it.)
- The Scholarly Communication FAQ from Create Change, http://www.arl.org/create/faculty/faq/scomm.html.
- The eprints Self-Archiving FAQ, http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/selfaq.htm.
-
G
- Government Printing Office (GPO).
- The official publisher of the U.S. government. It gives free online access to prodigious amounts of government information. One of its other projects (with OCLC) is Web Document Digital Archive.
- Home page, http://www.access.gpo.gov/.
- Gov.Research Center (GRC).
- Online access to government information in the sciences and technology. It is not free. Sponsored by the National Information Services Corp. and the National Technical Information Service.
- Home page, http://grc.ntis.gov/.
- GRC. See Gov.Research Center.
- Grey Literature.
- Some definitions cover all literature not controlled by commercial publishers, in which case most FOS would be grey literature. Other definitions cover only literature less formal than refereed, published scholarship, in which case most FOS would not be grey literature. Apart from this difference, the definitions agree that grey literature includes preprints, committee reports, working papers, conference proceedings, and dissertations. Non-academic grey literature includes government reports, business plans, market reports, and press releases.
- GPO. See Government Printing Office.
-
H
- Handle system.
- Software and the corresponding protocol to convert (technically, "resolve") a name into the URL or other metadatum of the object named. The most important application is to resolve a DOI into its URL. It allows the name to remain fixed while the URL and other metadata about the named object undergo change. From CNRI.
- Home page, http://www.handle.net/.
- HeadLine. See Hybrid Electronic Access and Delivery in the Library Networked Environment.
- Health InterNetwork Access to Research Initiative (HINARI).
- A program coordinated by the World Health Organization, and launched by it in collaboration with the Open Society Institute in which commercial publishers offer tiered pricing for their online biomedical journals. Nations in the bottom tier (per capita GNP below $1000) pay nothing. The top tier pays full price, and the middle tier pays at a discount.
- Home page, http://www.healthinternetwork.org/scipub.php.
- HEDS. See Higher Education Digitisation Service.
- Higher Education Digitisation Service (HEDS).
- A service to digitize texts and images from paper or microfilm for universities and other non-profit institutions. It is one of many organizations working on METAe. Funded by JISC as part of eLib.
- Home page, http://heds.herts.ac.uk/.
- HighWire Press.
- Publisher of the second largest free online archive of full-text science papers (after the NASA Astrophysics Data System). Founded in 1995, HighWire produces the electronic editions of a large number of print journals in the sciences, especially the biomedical fields. These journals have varying policies on how much of their content will be freely available online and how soon after print publication. From the Stanford University Libraries.
- Home page, http://highwire.stanford.edu/.
- Beta of new home page, http://mywire.stanford.edu/.
- List of HighWire journals, http://highwire.stanford.edu/lists/freeart.dtl.
- HINARI. See Health InterNetwork Access to Research Initiative.
- Hippias.
- A search engine for free online scholarship and other content in the field of philosophy. Hippias is peer-reviewed in the sense that the items in its index are limited to those which have been accepted by its board of editors. (Full disclosure: I am the general editor.) From Noetic Labs.
- Home page, http://hippias.evansville.edu/.
- History and Theory of Psychology Eprint Archive (HTP Prints).
- An eprint archive for psychology and the history of psychology. In addition to preprints, it will publish papers not suited to traditional journals in the field, e.g. conference papers, highly illustrated papers, longer essays, literature reviews, papers with a highly specific focus). The archive is OAI-compliant. HTP Prints does not perform peer review on its contents.
- Home page, http://htpprints.yorku.ca/.
- History E-Book Project.
- A project to digitize 500 backlist monographs in history, and 85 new titles, and in the process to create templates, technologies, and experience that will apply to other scholarly monographs. The resulting texts will be available online but not for free. Funded by the Mellon Foundation and administered by the ACLS.
- Home page, http://www.historyebook.org/.
- HTP Prints. See History and Theory of Psychology Eprint Archive.
- Hybrid Electronic Access and Delivery in the Library Networked Environment (HeadLine).
- A project to implement a model hybrid (print + digital) library. The three year project ended in July, 2001, and all its reports, newsletters, presentations, articles, and software are available at its web site. Funded by JISC as part of eLib.
- Home page, http://www.headline.ac.uk/.
-
I
- ibiblio.
- A large collection of free resources on the internet, including software, music, and scholarship in literature, art, history, science, politics, and cultural studies. Funded by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the Center for the Public Domain.
- Home page, http://www.ibiblio.org/.
- ICA. See International Council on Archives.
- ICAAP. See International Consortium for the Advancement of Academic Publication.
- ICOLC. See International Coalition of Library Consortia.
- ICSTI. See International Council for Scientific and Technical Information.
- ICSU. See International Council for Science.
- IDEAL. See International Digital Electronic Access Library.
- IDF. See International DOI Foundation.
- IFLA. See International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions.
- IFWA. See Immediate Free Web Access.
- Immediate Free Web Access (IFWA).
- Thomas Walker's proposed name (early 2000) for the sort of reader access that authors should request for their articles from journals. The term was adopted by the Florida Entomological Society, and has been used in the American Scientist forum, in Nature (April 2001), and in The Scientist (June 2001), but unfortunately has not caught on more widely.
- IMLS. See Institute of Museum and Library Services.
- Impact.
- The influence of a work of scholarship on other scholars in the field. If increased access leads to increased impact (not necessarily through a simple function), then making works of scholarship freely accessible online will increase their impact. This conclusion is controversial, as are various proposed methods for measuring impact.
- INASP. See International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications.
- INDECS. See Interoperability of Data in E-Commerce.
- Information Society Technologies Programme (IST).
- Agency of the European Union for helping individuals and enterprises realize the benefits of the information age. Among its projects are Arion, COVAX, DELOS, Diffuse, Digicult, NESSTAR, Renardus, TIPS, Torii, and others (see below). A program of FP5 and CORDIS.
- Home page, http://www.cordis.lu/ist/.
- See the long list of IST projects, http://www.cordis.lu/ist/projects.htm.
- InfoMed. See Project InfoMed.
- InfoTrieve.
- A large repository of for-pay journal articles online. Users can search the collection free of charge, but must pay to read full-text, which they can choose to receive electronically (by email) or in print (by fax, first-class mail, or courier). Users can locate articles in over 35,000 scholarly journals, and find full-text to download in a smaller but growing number of journals. While only searching, and the resulting bibliographic citations are free, this was a step forward at the time. Before IntroTrieve licensed MedLine from the U.S. government, for example, users had to pay steep connect-time fees ($30-50/hour) to search it. Now it is freely searchable on the internet and users pay only to download articles.
- Home page, http://www4.infotrieve.com/home.asp.
- Ingelfinger Rule.
- The policy adopted by some journals not to publish any article or research which has already been published or publicized elsewhere. Named after Franz Ingelfinger, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine. Journal rules on this subject are often called embargo policies.
- INSPIRAL. See Investigating Portals for Information Resources And Learning.
- Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).
- An independent agency of the U.S. federal government created in 1996 to support the nation's museums and libraries. Some of its grants fund digitization and free online content.
- Home page, http://www.imls.gov/.
- IMLS FAQ, http://www.imls.gov/about/abt_faqs.htm.
- Institute of Physics (IOP).
- London-based learned society and scientific publisher with many online services. One is to give free online access to the full-text of the current issues of each of its 29 physics journals, even to non-subscribers, as well as access to tables of contents, abstracts, and current awareness. Despite this, IOP can persuade a healthy number individuals and institutions to buy subscriptions by offering paying customers access to the electronic archive of past issues, links to cited and citing articles, and of course copies of the print edition.
- Home page, http://www.iop.org/.
- Institutional Service Component (ISC).
- In an OpenURL environment, this is the code describing the user's institution or context and, hence, what rights of access the user has to certain sources of information. Hence, a component of contextual linking and a piece of the solution to the appropriate copy problem.
- Intellectual Property Conservancy (IPC).
- By analogy with land conservancies, a collection of intellectual property rights purchased from their owners, or donated by their owners, for the purpose of sharing the intellectual property with the public. An IPC would either put its information into the public domain or at least make it free for the public to access and read. This method of sharing information acknowledges that it is not a commons (by paying money for it) in order to make a commons out of it.
- Because IPC is an idea, not an institution, it has no home page. But a good introduction to the idea can be found in this David Bearman D-Lib article from December 2000, http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december00/bearman/12bearman-full.html.
- Interactive Paper Project.
- A project to publish scholarly papers online in an interactive format. Readers could post "global" comments on the entire paper, more specific comments on any individual paragraph, or comments on any other comments. Readers could choose to read the primary text with the comments showing or only links to the comments showing. From the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign College of Education. The project was apparently abandoned in 1999.
- Home page, http://lrsdb.ed.uiuc.edu:591/ipp/default.htm. The home-page still contains some working examples of interactive papers.
- International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM).
- Trade association of large and small STM publishers. One of the initial sponsors of the DOI initiative.
- Home page, http://www.stm-assoc.org/.
- International Coalition of Library Consortia (ICOLC).
- A world-wide organization of library consortia. It has issued policy statements on DOIs, CrossRef, the appropriate copy problem, and the acquisition and lending of electronic information.
- Home page, http://www.library.yale.edu/consortia/.
- International Consortium for the Advancement of Academic Publication (ICAAP).
- Non-profit organization devoted to the support of free and affordable online scholarly journals. It offers a wide array of free services to online journals, including hosting, traffic statistics, back-ups, search engine placement, promotion, discussion software, ICAAP's own flavor of SGML, metatag and MARC format generators, and database content delivery. (Full disclosure: I'm on the ICAAP board.)
- Home page, http://www.icaap.org/.
- International Council for Science (ICSU).
- A non-governmental consortium of national science academies and research councils created to address interdisciplinary policy questions which no individual national or disciplinary organization could address as well alone.
- Home page, http://www.icsu.org/.
- ICSU-UNESCO statement of principles on electronic publishing in science, http://bestofscience.free.fr/icsu.html.
- International Council for Scientific and Technical Information (ICSTI).
- An international consortium of organizations that publish or use scientific information. Its mission is to support the interaction of its members and to promote the access, delivery, and use of scientific information in industry, academia, and government.
- Home page, http://www.icsti.org/.
- International Council on Archives (ICA).
- A non-profit organization for setting archival standards. ICA is now working with UNESCO and IFLA on guidelines for digitizing content already in the public domain.
- Home page, http://www.ica.org/.