Open Access News

• Mary Waltham, Challenges to the role of publishers
• Alma Swan and Sheridan Brown, Authors and electronic publishing: what authors want from the new technology
• Alan Gilchrist, Text retrieval: an overview
• Alastair Dryburgh, Open-access journals - nice idea, shame about the numbers? [no abstract]

(PS: It would be very helpful if every discipline had such an association. Not only would that create an organized voice for open access within every discipline, but it would make counting open-access journals and measuring overall progress much easier. Does anyone know of associations like APEJR in any other field?)

• Aimee Fifarek, Technology and privacy in the academic library
• Jeffrey N Gatten, The politics of the Uniform Computer Information Transaction Act (UCITA) in digital information policy development
• Brian Detlor and Clément Arsenault, Web information seeking and retrieval in digital library contexts: towards an intelligent agent solution
• Mike Thelwall, Research dissemination and invocation on the Web

(PS: This is an exemplary policy. It respects faculty freedom to publish where and when they please. It respects copyright. It respects journals and their traditional role in providing peer review. It is very short and simple --even simpler in non-RAE countries. It is easy and inexpensive to implement. And it would provide open access to the research output of every university adopting it. You already know the benefits: it will accelerate research in every field, put rich and poor on an equal footing, give new visibility to every participating institution, and give every researcher in such institutions a larger audience and impact. Every university and laboratory should adopt it. Submit it for consideration at your own institution and spread the word. If you have doubts or questions, submit them to the discussion thread and see how they are answered or consult the Self-Archiving FAQ.)

(PS: This is an important blow to the DMCA, which prohibits circumventing copy protection for any reason. Now circumvention for fair use is lawful in Norway, as it should be everywhere. Next questions: what other countries will follow Norway, and can Hollywood invent a business model compatible with fair use and consumer rights?)

(PS. This case is only partly about challenging countries like England where copyrights can be perpetual. It's also important for clarifying the rules about exporting works from countries in which they are in the public domain into countries in which they are still under copyright. In another case raising the same issue, the European copyright is expiring on some classic jazz, opera, and rock 'n' roll albums, while the U.S. copyrights are still valid. Neil Turkewitz of the RIAA has said that "[t]he import of those products [into the U.S.] would be an act of piracy." If Somma wins her Peter Pan case, or if the European music exporters win theirs, then for the first time we will see an economic incentive for nations to adopt shorter copyright terms than the rest of the world, reversing the destructive logic of copyright term-ratcheting and global "harmonization" initiatives.)