Open Access News

David Sharp is supposed to have an editorial on the LaPorte theory in the December 21 Lancet, but either it's not online or I can't find it. (Can anyone help with the text or URL?)

Answer: Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov reflecting on his experience in the United States and the chill it has sent through the programming world.

In the same issue, Jon Bing and Robert Cailliau reflect on how science can take advantage of the internet . They mention access as one of the first advantages, but while they don't seem to know of any of the open-access initiatives, they assume its success enough to worry about the next phase. Quoting Bing: "'The need now is to develop the navigating and guidance strategies – what we call meta-information – to enable us to take our bearings in a prolific environment."

BTW, the rest of this issue is devoted to science and the media and would be useful for scientists whose work or (say) open-access advocacy leads them to deal with the press.

• Dagobert Soergel, A Framework for Digital Library Research: Broadening the Vision
• Andreas Rauber and four co-authors, Uncovering Information Hidden in Web Archives: A Glimpse at Web Analysis Building on Data Warehouses
• Julien Masanès, Towards Continuous Web Archiving: First Results and an Agenda for the Future
• Gary Marchionini and Gary Geisler, The Open Video Digital Library
• Donald W. King and Carol Hansen Montgomery, After Migration to an Electronic Journal Collection: Impact on Faculty and Doctoral Students
• Lawrence M. Rudner and two co-authors, Who Is Reading On-line Education Journals? Why? And What Are They Reading?
• Lee Iverson, Report on eLibrary@UBC 4: Research, Collaboration and the Digital Library - Visions for 2010
• Lilian van der Vaart, DARE: A New Age in the Provision of Academic Information
• Maggie Jones, JISC Consultancy on Archiving of Licensed E-journals
• Gerrit Alewaeters and Stefaan Renard, Vlink - an OpenURL Link Generator

From Amy Harmon's story in the December 17 New York Times: "By providing a highly visible alternative to what they view as an outmoded system of distributing information, the founders hope science itself will be transformed. The two journals are the first of what they envision as a vast electronic library in which no one has to pay dues or seek permission to read, copy or use the collective product of the world's academic research....[I]n addition to making data available to more people sooner, the electronic library's founders argue that the research itself becomes more valuable when it is not walled off by copyrights and Balkanized in separate electronic databases. They envision the sprouting of a kind of cyber neural network, where all of scientific knowledge can be searched, sorted and grafted with a fluidity that will speed discovery."

(PS: This is an important event. PLoS is a major open-access initiative. Its first strategy asked scientists not to submit their work to journals that didn't provide open access to their contents within six months of print publication. It attracted over 30,000 public signatures but only disappointing follow-through. This is the second strategy, and it not only aligns with other recent strategies, such as the Budapest Open Access Initiative, but has the high profile earned by the first strategy, the growing number of public signatures, PLoS co-founder and Nobel laureate, Harold Varmus, and the new Moore Foundation grant.)

CC has also created a license for what it calls The Founders' Copyright, under which the copyright holder agrees to assign the work to the public domain after only 14 years, the copyright term in effect in 1790 that reflects the framers' sense of the right balance between the temporary monopoly of copyright and the public domain. (Today's copyright term in the U.S. is the life of the author plus 70 years.)