Open Access News

According to a recent Science Watch , Iran has become the second country after Egypt in the Middle East (excluding Israel, which is substantially larger in volume) in terms of number of scientific publications, especially in chemistry, neuroscience, and materials science. In just the past 10 years, Iranian scholars have nearly quadrupled their previous records. Isn't it paradoxical to regressively penalize the youth, the scientists, and the progressive reform-minded elements there simply because we aspire to see a change in the political system?

Source: Library Juice

"Research" must be given a large and liberal interpretation in order to ensure that users' rights are not unduly constrained, and is not limited to non-commercial or private contexts. Lawyers carrying on the business of law for profit are conducting research within the meaning of s. 29. The following factors help determine whether a dealing is fair: the purpose of the dealing, the character of the dealing, the amount of the dealing, the nature of the work, available alternatives to the dealing, and the effect of the dealing on the work. Here, the Law Society's dealings with the publishers' works through its custom photocopy service were research-based and fair. The access policy places appropriate limits on the type of copying that the Law Society will do. If a request does not appear to be for the purpose of research, criticism, review or private study, the copy will not be made. If a question arises as to whether the stated purpose is legitimate, the reference librarian will review the matter. The access policy limits the amount of work that will be copied, and the reference librarian reviews requests that exceed what might typically be considered reasonable and has the right to refuse to fulfill a request.

Some have remarked that this ruling constitutes a balance between user's rights and commercial interests. (Source: Interesting-People via Boing Boing Blog)

Faculty and staff may wish to separate themselves from publishers whose business practices do not support open access. This could be done by withholding publications from their journals or choosing not to sit on their editorial boards.

Such a change in our university and departmental perspective will have many ramifications in our scholarly culture, since publication is a core value in our research and creative activities. In tenure and promotion decisions faculty and staff must be confident that there is departmental and university support for their decisions to publish in referred journals with more open access. [...]

[The Faculty Council] calls on all faculty, staff, and students of Indiana University Bloomington to work toward a more open publishing system by increasing their support of existing refereed journals and publishers whose practices are consistent with open access to scholarly communication and to support those who make such choices when considering tenure and promotion[.]

Also see Why engage in e-science? Library Information Update, March 2004, an anonymous commentary on the Hey-Trefethen article. Excerpt: "Librarians may not have noticed, but there is a revolution going on - the democratisation of science. This is a sub-agenda of the campaign to persuade researchers to deposit their research results in open access archives. It is not all about breaking commercial publishers' monopoly of copyright in scientific journals. It means that someone who didn't do the original research will be able to analyse someone else's data and even win the Nobel Prize, using that data. And it reflects the fact that, in science and engineering, at least, the data changes. This creates its own challenges, because research databases have complex metadata and you need to make sure that the metadata also changes appropriately - which is where librarians come in."