Richard Poynder, The Open Wars, Open and Shut, March 28, 2005. Excerpt: 'With the launch of Yahoo Search for Creative Commons we are reminded once again that in the digital networked world two different publishing models continue to battle for mindshare: one open, the other closed. Which is the more sustainable in the long term? And what relevance does the wider movement for open content have for the debate about Open Access?....For OA publishers like BioMed Central (BMC) and the Public Library of Science (PLoS) the service is of immediate interest, since both publish under CC licences....This, says BMC's technical director Matthew Cockerill, is good news for OA. "Scientists make increasing uses of Internet search engines such as Yahoo to search the literature. The collaboration between Creative Commons and Yahoo is important as it means that scientists can now easily identify articles (such as those published by BioMed Central) that can be freely downloaded, redistributed and used to create derivative works. Possible applications of this include text mining, specialised subject specific databases, and digital archiving/preservation systems." ...For researchers who provide OA to their papers by self-archiving them the new service will have less immediate appeal, since self-archiving usually means continuing to publish in traditional subscription-based journals and then depositing the papers in an institutional repository. Since publishers routinely acquire the copyright in papers they publish self-archiving authors will not be able to archive them using a CC licence....But where do we go from here? Commenting on the new Yahoo service on his blog OA researcher Peter Suber says: "As copyright locks down more content more tightly, searchers will want reuse rights almost as much as relevance. Search engines that find both will have an advantage. Conversely, authors and publishers who consent to grant more reuse rights than fair-use alone already provides should make their consent machine-readable for the next generation of search engines."'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 3/28/2005 08:13:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
