Open Access News

• Chris Awre, Finding that document! Enhancing the discovery and locating of journals
• Lars Leon, Linking four libraries 9,012km apart: steps to global resource sharing
• Petra Labriga, Times of change for document delivery: a view from Infotrieve
• Joachim Schöpfel, Transitions - news on the access to digital information in France

• Cathrine Harboe-Ree and Andrew Treloar, Connecting the Dots Downunder: Towards An Integrated Institutional Approach To Digital Content Management
• Marian Hanley, PADI (Preserving Access to Digital Information) and Safekeeping
• MacKenzie Smith, DSpace for E-Print Archives
• Gerhard Beier and Theresa Velden, The eDoc-Server Project: Building an Institutional Repository for the Max Planck Society
• Michael Jost and Hans J. Becker, EULER - A Real Virtual Library for Mathematics

"They're trying to punish these countries they've identified as evil," said Stuart J. Youngner, a professor at Case Western Reserve University who helped organize the conference. "But the end result of this is an infringement on academic freedom, our freedom as citizens to travel and also damaging to science in the United States and around the world."

Update (3/12/04): Burton Bollag, Treasury Department Bars U.S. Scholars From Attending Conference in Cuba, Chronicle of Higher Education Daily Update, March 12, 2004. (Access restricted to subscribers.) In addition to the above, Bollag reports that OFAC sent a letter to the travel company handling transportation to and from the conference, saying "that in the Bush administration's view, the gathering was not an international conference, but a Cuban one." OFAC also requested a resume along with a list of justifications for attending the conference, but by then it was too late to provide such information since the conference had already started." Bollag also notes a letter from four groups, "including the Center for International Policy and the Latin America Working Group," protesting the OFAC action.

Update (3/12/04): Eric Sabo, Communism is not brain-dead:Cuban coma conference struggles on after US keeps researchers from attending, The Scientist, March 12, 2004. A report from someone who was actually able to attend the conference and the reaction to prohibitions on American would-be attendees.

• American Association of Law Libraries (AALL), American Library Association (ALA), Association of Academic Health Sciences Libraries (AAHSL), Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL), Association of Research Libraries (ARL), Medical Library Association (MLA), Public Knowledge (PK), and the Scholarly Publication and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), Memorandum Submitted to the United Kingdom House of Commons Science and Technology Committee Inquiry on Scientific Publications
• Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP), Response to Science and Technology Committee Inquiry into Scientific Publications
• Matthew Cockerill, Technical Director of BioMed Central (BMC), How accessible is NHS-funded research to the general public and to the NHS's own researchers?
• Jan Velterop, Publisher of BioMed Central (BMC), Submission to the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee's Inquiry into Scientific Publications

For other written submissions, see my list in SOAN for 3/2/04. For now, I'm only blogging links to submissions that were missing from the SOAN list or dead at the time.

Deep-web search engines are also opening access to research literature. "For example, when gene researchers identify a new DNA sequence, they usually submit the sequence to the National Institutes of Health's GenBank -- a public deep Web resource -- before submitting it to journals for publication." Wright also gives a mini-picture of the OA movement apart from any connection to deep-web search engines.

Finally, on a very different front, search engine relevance algorithms provide a quality filter that challenges some of the traditional functions of peer review. "And as more scholarship finds its way onto the Web, page-ranking algorithms are also providing an alternative quality rating system to the traditional scholarly peer review that journals have always employed....While page ranking won't replace the scholarly review process anytime soon, the expansion of public Web search engines will put downward pressure on the premium that publishers can command. 'I don't think [page ranking] is more reliable,' says [Peter] Lyman [professor of Information Management and Systems at Berkeley], 'but I do think it's perceived as legitimate. The cost of creating formally quality-controlled information may drive people to consider lower-cost alternatives.' " (Thanks to Al Magary.)