Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Thursday, July 21, 2005

New OA journal on copyright

Copyright is a new peer-reviewed, open-access journal focusing on copyright in the internet age. The editors include Lawrence Lessig and Michael Geist. From the site: 'Copyright seeks articles on all topics related to copyright, including: Digital Rights Management, Quantitative studies of the effects of legislation, Scholarly communication and Open Access, Peer-to-peer networks, International copyright, Collaborative authorship, Blogs and other new media, Collaborative filtering, Copyright in developing nations, Social implications of copyright.'

The journal will support an unusual, wiki-based form of author collaboration. '[W]hile the majority of articles will still be published in the traditional fashion, a novel, collaborative approach has been implemented as well. Potential authors can simply begin contributing to such an article while the system tracks the individuals' contributions. The article is then submitted through the normal review process and, if accepted, authorship is assigned based on the tracked contributions as the last step of the review process.' One of the collaborative papers now in progress is on Open Access and Reputation. Help write or revise it and join the list of co-authors.

(PS: I like the wiki experiment. The editors can launch important topics without knowing who might be qualified to write on them and without committing the journal to publish the results unless they are good enough.)

The same wiki supports a series of community projects. One current project is on self-archiving. This is the wiki first launched by Ari Friedman (blogged here on June 27), now under the journal's umbrella.