Open Access News

Stu: Can you share your impressions of the developments in the area of Institutional Repositories such as the MIT-Hewlett Packard collaboration on DSpace? Are there impediments that must be overcome for such systems to play an important role in sustaining and promoting scholarly communication?

Tim: Projects such as SIMILE which will leverage and extend DSpace by enhancing its support for arbitrary schemas and metadata though the application of Semantic Web technologies are particularly important in facilitating scholarly communication. As I mentioned earlier, to the extent that data can be encoded in common syntaxes like RDF and described with public vocabularies, they can be more accessible and more useful. People and applications can draw better correlations, better connections, better inferencing, and these can lead us to more effective use of information. Perhaps nowhere in the academic environment is this more important than the area of scholarly communication.

The impediments to success are much the same as impediments in the larger Web. We currently lack an ethos for reliable web publication. We need a closer connection between the technology and the institutional commitments necessary to maintain persistent identifiers and namespaces. We need a realignment of legal constraints and recognition of fair use within the context of the new digital infrastructure. We need to avoid as far as possible the constraints of patents or monopoly at any of the layers of the infrastructure.

We also need to sustain the open connectivity - the linking among people, organizations, data, and ideas - that drive the growth and diversity of the Web. We need to build all of this on a foundation of solid, clean Web standards that will be of universal benefit - for scholarship, for commerce, and for public and private information spaces.

Governments, universities, research institutions, funding agencies, foundations, libraries, museums, archives, learned societies and professional associations who share the vision expressed in the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities are therefore invited to join the signatories that have already signed the Declaration.

Please contact:
Prof. Dr. Peter Gruss
President of the Max Planck Society
Hofgartenstraβe 8
D-80539 Munich
Germany
e-mail: praesident@gv.mpg.de

Toll-access publishing denies to the science community the benefit, and ignores the growing necessity, to search, mine and exploit all the available findings using the best tools available. As long as a substantial proportion of research is placed behind toll-access barriers such as operated by Elsevier and others, the ability of scientists to extract knowledge from the literature will be unnecessarily limited. The sooner Open Access becomes the universal method to publish science research findings the sooner will the active research scientists benefit from efficient and effective use of the findings of science.

An Open Access License gives you the freedom to access [our databases] without worrying about online costs. You simply pay a set fee per year covering all connect hour, online display, offline print, and SDI (Alert) charges.

1. We all admit that most information is born digital now, even if that's not how it's published.
2. Department chairs, even in History departments, accept the idea that quality and impact are what matter, not the quantity or the medium or the genre of publication
3. Open Access becomes the new political correctness among content-producers
4. Libraries insist on collecting digital content and universities support their effort to do so, out of an awareness that this is the key to a better world
5. University presses normalize digital information to lower the cost of collecting and preserving it, and they perform a number of other functions that lower the cost of scholarship and increase its impact
6. Provosts use subsidies, marketing, and university policy to encourage an ethos of open access among faculty, and to support open access principles as being in the best interest of all research organizations.
7. Provosts use subsidies, marketing, and university policy to encourage collaboration between libraries and presses

This case is about the attempt of a copyright owner to use copyright law to block access to data that not only are neither copyrightable nor copyrighted, but were not created or obtained by the copyright owner. The owner is trying to secrete the data in its copyrighted program --a program the existence of which reduced the likelihood that the data would be retained in a form in which they would have been readily accessible. It would be appalling if such an attempt could succeed.