Open Access News

News from the open access movement

Saturday, November 02, 2002

The FOS Newsletter will now be covered in The Informed Librarian, a free and comprehensive newsletter compiling links to the latest issues of over 200 library-related publications.

Posted by Peter Suber at 11/02/2002 12:31:00 PM.

UNESCO will present its draft Charter on the Preservation of the Digital Heritage at the first of several Regional Consultation Meetings in Canberra, Australia, November 4-6.

Posted by Peter Suber at 11/02/2002 09:38:00 AM.

UNESCO and the International Council on Archives have signed a six-year agreement to work together to provide long-term access and preservation for the information held in public archives around the world.

Posted by Peter Suber at 11/02/2002 09:34:00 AM.

Thomas Zo�ga Rams�y, Free consciousness articles � And how to find them on the Web, Science and Consciousness Review, October 2002. Rams�y covers author home pages, eprint archives (such as CogPrints), and open-access peer-reviewed journals (such as Psyche and Psycholoquy).

Posted by Peter Suber at 11/02/2002 09:17:00 AM.

In the September issue of Information Today, Richard Poynder describes the transformation of MCB University Press into Emerald and how it left behind some, but not all, of the practices that angered librarians.

Posted by Peter Suber at 11/02/2002 08:45:00 AM.

Friday, November 01, 2002

More on copyright extension and the DMCA....Marjorie Heins summarizes the history and issues with particular emphasis on library interests and freedom of speech. If you need a good introduction and overview, this is a good place to start. (Thanks to LIS News.)

Posted by Peter Suber at 11/01/2002 09:12:00 AM.

The Vatican has chosen Hewlett-Packard to help it provide open access to digital versions of the manuscripts in its Apostolic Library. (Thanks to LIS News.)

Posted by Peter Suber at 11/01/2002 08:52:00 AM.

MIT will officially launch its DSpace open-source archiving software on November 4 at a symposium, Scholarly Communication in the Digital World. After the symposium, videos of the presentations will be available at the MIT World site.

Posted by Peter Suber at 11/01/2002 08:40:00 AM.

Thursday, October 31, 2002

Henry Waxman (D-CA) and other Democrats have sent an open letter to Tommy Thompson, Secretary of Health and Human Services, charging that several government agencies have removed valid scientific information from their web sites. There is no national security issue here. The censored information tends to show that abortion is safer, and sex education classes and condoms more effective, than the Bush administration wants the public to believe. Also see the story in OMB Watcher about the Waxman letter. (Thanks to Terry Foreman.)

Posted by Peter Suber at 10/31/2002 09:20:00 PM.

Phase 2 of the OAIster Project began today. OAIster digs content out of the deep internet and makes it available through the OAI protocol. See the project description and the features and fixes new to Phase 2.

Posted by Peter Suber at 10/31/2002 08:52:00 PM.

The University of Southampton has just released GNU Eprints version 2.2. The site includes a list of features and fixes new to 2.2, a list of sites using Eprints software, and a demo archive.

Posted by Peter Suber at 10/31/2002 01:44:00 PM.

The presentations from two recent conferences on eprint archiving are now online: (1) Second Workshop on the Open Archives Intiative: Gaining Independence with E-Prints Archives and OAI, October 17, Geneva, and (2) Institutional Repositories: A Workshop on Creating an Intrastructure for Faculty-Library Partnerships, Washington, D.C., October 18. (Thanks to Alison Buckholtz of SPARC.)

Posted by Peter Suber at 10/31/2002 01:10:00 PM.

Wednesday, October 30, 2002

More on the Office of Global Internet Freedom....Proponents of the bill to create the OGIF argue that to help advance freedom and democracy around the world, the U.S. needn't provide content, as it did with the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, but merely free access to the unfiltered internet. In practice this means providing tools to enable internet users in every country to bypass national censorship and filtering systems. (PS: Good idea but will it pass? How interested is the U.S. in lifting worldwide restrictions on access to information? Last week Reports Without Borders released the results of a global survey showing that the U.S. ranks 17th in freedom of the press.)

Posted by Peter Suber at 10/30/2002 11:42:00 AM.

India's National Centre for Science Information has just launched an OAI-compliant eprint archive for the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore.

Posted by Peter Suber at 10/30/2002 08:37:00 AM.

Tuesday, October 29, 2002

In the October 28 issue of The Scientist, David Bradley interviews key figures from the FOS movement and the publishing industry on the recent OFT report concluding that "the internet...is increasingly allowing the academic community to bypass expensive commercial publishers".

Posted by Peter Suber at 10/29/2002 07:44:00 PM.

The Open Archives Forum is conducting an online questionnaire on scholarly repositories that are, or might become, OAI-compliant.

Posted by Peter Suber at 10/29/2002 09:25:00 AM.

Monday, October 28, 2002

The October issue of DigiCULT.Info is now online.

Posted by Peter Suber at 10/28/2002 10:05:00 PM.

More free searching of unfree content....The Inktomi search engine now indexes eLibrary articles. When priced articles come up in a search, users may click to purchase them or to see a free abstract. (Thanks to VASND.)

Posted by Peter Suber at 10/28/2002 11:43:00 AM.

Sunday, October 27, 2002

Arts & Letters Daily was offline and near bankruptcy for a time recently. But it has now been rescued by the Chronicle of Higher Education. A&LD editor Dennis Dutton relates the good news in an open letter dated October 24.

Posted by Peter Suber at 10/27/2002 01:33:00 PM.

Stephen Maurer, Promoting and Disseminating Knowledge: The Public/Private Interface and its appendices A, B, and C. This is the background paper for participants in the Symposium on the Role of Scientific and Technical Data and Infdormation in the Public Domain (Washington, September 5-6).

Excerpt: "Much of the current debate over the public domain reduces the analysis to slogans like 'no one should own the human genome' or 'academic scientists should work with, but not for, companies.' This Paper takes a more systematic approach. It starts from the proposition that contracts should be designed to (a) promote the discovery of new facts, and (b) encourage people to use existing research results. It then asks when academic/industry transactions that restrict the 'public domain' are likely to compromise those goals."

Posted by Peter Suber at 10/27/2002 10:19:00 AM.