Guide to the Open Access Movement

Formerly called the Guide to the Free Online Scholarship Movement.


This is a guide to the terminology, acronyms, initiatives, standards, technologies, and players in the open-access or free online scholarship (FOS) movement —the movement to publish scholarly literature on the internet and make it available to readers free of charge and free of unnecessary licensing restrictions.

If you're new to the concept of open access, then see my Open Access Overview. It's designed to be an introduction. This guide, by contrast, is more like a reference work.

The guide has many purposes. It should help you find background on unexplained terms or names you encounter in research on any related topic. For the same reason, it will allow me to use terms and names in my newsletter and blog without explaining each one every time. Above all, it should make it easier for specialists from one sector (such as research, libraries, publishing) to understand the contributions to this movement made by specialists from other sectors. This movement isn't only multi-disciplinary, encompassing all the academic disciplines, but also multi-industrial, drawing on libraries and universities and such varied economic sectors beyond the academy as publishing, telecommunications, software engineering, philanthropy, and government. It is also multi-national, building on the work of individuals and organizations from around the world. Without special study one cannot appreciate the contributions of all these players to the open-access movement. I hope this guide brings recognition to the contributors and understanding to those hoping to see the big picture.

Having said this, I should emphasize that you needn't see the big picture in order to do useful work that advances the cause. If you did, we wouldn't be as far along as we are.

Using the guide

  • To search the guide, wait for the whole file to load and then use the search command on your browser.
  • In general I link from acronyms to full names, and put details and descriptions only under the full names. This is awkward for organizations better known by their acronyms than by their full names, but the consistency helps in the long run. I only make exceptions for groups whose full names, though discoverable, are virtually unknown. If you look for a entity under the name known to you, you should find either an entry or a link to one.
  • In the entries, links attached to acronyms, names, or words are cross-references which jump to other entries in the guide. Links with their URLs showing jump to outside pages.
  • When I can, I keep my descriptions brief and link to web pages for further details. This makes it easier to keep entries up to date.
  • So far I have omitted entries for individual people.
  • The guide is more complete for the United States and the UK than for other countries. I welcome suggestions that would help me expand the coverage for the rest of the world.
  • Unless I'm quoting the usage of others, I prefer "ejournal" to "e-journal" or "eJournal". The same goes for analogous terms like "ebook" and "ecommerce". This is in part a conscious attempt to hasten the domestication of these terms. It was clear that electronic mail was an accepted fact of life, and not a novelty, when it began to be called "email" rather than "e-mail".

The press of other work has forced me to stop updating this guide. However, I plan to leave it online indefinitely. Please feel free to make use of what's useful here, bearing in mind that it is very far from up to date. For a more recent picture of OA, bridging the gap between this old guide and the present, see my blog, newsletter, and overview.

I welcome corrections, comments, and suggestions.

Peter Suber
Last revised July 14, 2004.


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These links will work only when the corresponding section of the file has loaded, which may take a moment.


A

AAP. See Association of American Publishers.

Academic Metadata Format (AMF).
A proposed metadata standard for academic literature, coded in XML. Intended to do better than the Dublin Core at describing academic content, initially it will be applied to arXiv and RePEc, and will be used by OpCit. Supported by the Open Archives Initiative.
  • Home page, http://amf.openlib.org/doc/ebisu.html.

    Académie des Sciences Copyright Statement.
    A public statement from France's Académie des Sciences (December 6, 2001) calling on the European Commission not to apply ordinary copyright rules to scientific publications for which the authors seek no payment. The public statement includes a web form for members of the public to add their signatures.
  • Home page, http://www-mathdoc.ujf-grenoble.fr/DA/.

    Advanced Library Collection Management Environment (ALCME).
    A suite of open source tools for library management, including support for repository interfaces, metadata harvesting, and authority control. From OCLC. The ALCME metadata harvesting tools are OAI-compliant.
  • Home page, http://alcme.oclc.org/index.html.

    ALCME. See Advanced Library Collection Management Environment.

    ACLS. See American Council of Learned Societies.

    ACRL. See Association of College and Research Libraries.

    ADS. See Astrophysics Data System.

    Advance Online Publication (AOP).
    A policy adopted by most members of the Nature family of print journals in the sciences to post accepted articles to the internet as soon as they are ready. These are the refereed and edited versions of the articles, final in every way except for their pagination. The articles include DOIs and participate in CrossRef. Nature makes abstracts available on its web site free of charge, but limits full-text to paying subscribers. Compare ScienceExpress.
  • Nature's AOP FAQ, http://www.nature.com/neuro/aop/.

    AHDS. See Arts and Humanities Data Service.

    ALA. See American Library Association.

    ALM.
    A common abbreviation for Archives, Libraries, and Museums. For example, "ALM institutions" have many common interests in making the transition to the digital age. Sometimes called memory institutions.

    ALPSP. See Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers.

    Amedeo.
    A provider of free online services to support medical research. The services include a medical search engine, weekly emails summarizing recent contents of user-selected journals, personal web pages displaying user-selected abstracts, and overviews of research in the past 12 or 24 months on user-selected topics. Amedeo is funded by pharmaceutical companies.
  • Home page, http://amedeo.com/.

    American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS).
    A non-profit federation of American learned societies, primarily in the social sciences and humanities. Among its projects are the History E-Book Project and NINCH.
  • Home page, http://www.acls.org/.

    American Library Association (ALA).
    The professional association of American libraries. Important defender of readers' rights to unfiltered and uncensored literature. One of its important divisions is ACRL.
  • Home page, http://www.ala.org/.

    American Memory.
    A free online multi-media collection from the Library of Congress. See National Digital Library Program.
  • Home page, http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/ammemhome.html.

    AMF. See Academic Metadata Format.

    AOP. See Advance Online Publication.

    Appropriate copy problem.
    The problem of making links from a web page of scholarly resources point to copies of the resources owned or licensed by the user or her institution. The technology for solving this problem is sometimes called local, localized, contextual, or context-sensitive linking.

    ARC. See Cross Archive Searching Service.

    Archive.
    For most FOS initiatives, an archive is simply an open-access collection or repository of digital works of scholarship. Also see Open Archives Initiative and self-archiving.

    Archivelet.
    An archive of an individual scholar's scholarship, as opposed to an archive for an entire institution or discipline. The term was introduced by the makers of Kepler software, which creates archivelets.

    Argos.
    A search engine for free online scholarship and other content in the field of ancient and medieval history. Argos is peer-reviewed in the sense that the items in its index are limited to those which have been accepted by its board of editors. The general editor is Tony Beavers. From Noetic Labs.
  • Home page, http://argos.evansville.edu/.

    Ariadne.
    A scholarly journal that often publishes articles on FOS issues.
  • Home page, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/.

    Arion.
    An architecture for searching and retrieving digital scientific data, text, and software. From IST (hence CORDIS).
  • Home page, http://dlforum.external.forth.gr:8080/

    ARL. See Association of Research Libraries.

    Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS).
    A service to assist scholars in the UK to create and maintain digital collections in the arts and humanities. It supports the Archaeology Data Service, Visual Arts Data Service, Oxford Text Archive, History Data Service, and Performing Arts Data Service. Funded by JISC and the UK Arts and Humanities Research Board.
  • Home page, http://ahds.ac.uk/.

    arXiv.
    An OAI-compliant archive of electronic preprints in physics, mathematics, computer science, and non-linear sciences. Created by Paul Ginsparg in 1991, it is one of the oldest archives of free online scholarship. It served as the testbed or first dataset for the Open Citation Project. Funded by the NSF and U.S. Department of Energy. In older literature sometimes called the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) preprint or eprint archive. Sometimes called the Ginsparg archive, and sometimes simply called xxx after the original server name (xxx.lanl.gov). In August 2001 the primary arXiv site moved from Los Alamos to Cornell University.
  • Home page http://arXiv.org/.
  • Arxiv FAQ, http://www.arxiv.org/help/faq.

    Association of American Publishers (AAP).
    The largest trade association of American book and journal publishers. These for-profit publishers generally resist FOS. One of the sponsors of the DOI standard. Among its other projects is MICI.
  • Home page, http://www.publishers.org/index.htm.
  • AAP Division of Professional and Scholarly Publishing, http://www.pspcentral.org/.

    Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL).
    A division of the ALA. One of its projects is Create Change.
  • Home page, http://www.ala.org/acrl/.

    Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP).
    The professional association of non-profit publishers, especially non-profit academic publishers. It publishes the journal, Learned Publishing.
  • Home page, http://www.alpsp.org/.

    Association of Research Libraries (ARL).
    A non-profit association of North American research libraries. One of its priorities is making scholarly literature more affordable. Among its programs are CNI, Create Change, the Directory of Scholarly Electronic Journals and Academic Discussion Lists, the Scholars Portal, and SPARC.
  • Home page, http://www.arl.org/.

    Astrophysics Data System (ADS).
    The largest archive of free online abstracts and full-text papers in the sciences. ADS papers are limited to astronomy, astrophysics, planetary sciences, and solar physics. Funded by NASA.
  • Home page, http://adswww.harvard.edu/.

    Author Fees.
    One method to subsidize the costs of free online access to scholarship (i.e. without charging readers). If a journal has already accepted an article on the merits, then it might charge the author a fee to make the article freely available online. At some print journals, this is optional; if authors choose not to pay the fee, their article appears only in print. At some online journals, the fee is required.

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    B

    Benton Foundation.
    A philanthropic organization funding projects to bridge the digital divide.
  • Home page, http://www.benton.org/.

    bepress. See Berkeley Electronic Press.

    Berkeley Electronic Press (bepress).
    A publisher of free online scholarly journals. Bepress journals leave copyright in the hands of authors and are usually peer-reviewed. Their production and management are facilitated by bepress software which handles every step of the process for authors, editors, and reviewers. The software not only keeps costs down but also makes it easy for the press to launch new journals. The bepress software is compatible with eprints software, and hence makes it possible to integrate a scholarly journal with an OAI-compliant archive. In October 2001 bepress entered a partnership with CDL to make its software available to researchers associated with the University of California.
  • Home page, http://www.bepress.com/.
  • bepress FAQ, http://www.bepress.com/faq.html.

    BIND. See Biomolecular Interaction Network Database.

    Bioline (BL).
    A non-profit publisher of free and affordable online biomedical journals containing research from developing countries such as Brazil, Cuba, India, Indonesia, Kenya, South Africa, Uganda, and Zimbabwe. From the University of Toronto Libraries and Brazil's Reference Center on Environmental Information.
  • Home page, http://www.bioline.org.br.

    BioMed Central.
    A publisher of peer reviewed electronic journals in biology and medicine. Although it is a for-profit publisher, it provides free online access to all its research articles. Starting in 2002, authors will be charged processing fees, although these will be waived for authors from developing countries and in some other circumstances. Authors always retain the copyright to their articles. BioMed Central produces annual print editions for archival purposes, one for biology and one for medicine, and may eventually produce one for each of its journals. All articles published by BioMed Central are deposited with PubMed Central, where they are also available, and the company actively encourags others, such as national libraries, to incorporate all or a subset of the articles in their permanent archives. A member of the Current Science Group.
  • Home page, http://www.biomedcentral.com/.
  • BioMed Central FAQ, http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/faq.asp.

    Biomolecular Interaction Network Database (BIND).
    Free online database of research papers on protein interaction in humans and other animals. The purpose is to accelerate the development of new medicines. Run by Blueprint, a non-profit organization funded by IBM and a handful of Canadian medical institutes.
  • Home page, http://www.bind.ca/.
  • Blueprint, http://137.82.44.24/.

    BioOne.
    A growing collection of online, full-text, peer-reviewed journals in biology. Access is not free. Most are electronic versions of journals which previously appeared only in print. BioOne supports reference linking, article DOIs, cross-journal searching, and email alerts for new issues of any participating journal. BioOne contents are archived by OCLC. BioOne is run by the non-profit BioOne Corporation, which is jointly governed by the American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS), SPARC, the University of Kansas, the Big 12 Plus Libraries Consortium, and Allen Press.
  • Home page, http://www.bioone.org/.
  • BioOne FAQ, http://www.bioone.org/bioone/?request=get-help-faq.

    Bireme.
    "Latin American and Caribbean Center on Health Sciences Information." A Brazilian foundation dedicated to free and affordable access to health information. It supports online health initiatives throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. Among its projects are the Declaration of Havana, the Declaration of San José, Project InfoMed, SciELO, and the Virtual Health Library. Bireme is one of the regional centers of MedLine. Funded by the government of Brazil, the Federal University of São Paulo, Human Development Program, the Pan American Health Organization, and the World Health Organization.
  • Home page, http://www.bireme.br/bvs/bireme/I/homepage.htm.

    BL. See Bioline.

    BlueSky.
    A software suite to streamline every aspect of producing a scholarly journal, either for print, for CD, or for the internet. The goal is to make the production costs so low that producers can subsidize the journal and offer it to readers free of charge. BlueSky can generate OAI metadata for the journals it produces.
  • Home page, http://www.blueskyscholars.com/

    BMC. See BioMed Central.

    BOAI. See Budapest Open Access Initiative.

    Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI).
    A public statement in support of open access for scholarly journal articles, and an interactive web site through which individual and institutional supporters of the cause can add their signatures (officially launched February 14, 2002). The initiative endorses two strategies for achieving FOS. The first is self-archiving. The second is the launch of a new generation of FOS journals committed to open access, and assistance to established journals willing to make the transition to open access. The statement arose from a December 2001 meeting in Budapest, hosted by the Open Society Institute (OSI). One purpose of the BOAI is to persuade foundations and other organizations to donate resources (money, hardware, software, training) to the cause, a campaign in which OSI led by example. (Full disclosure:  I was a participant in the Budapest meeting and one of the original signatories.)
  • Home page, http://www.soros.org/openaccess/.
  • The BOAI FAQ, http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm.

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    C

    CAPM. See Comprehensive Access to Printed Materials.

    CDL. See California Digital Library.

    California Digital Library (CDL).
    The digital library for the ten campuses of the University of California, and an organization to help researchers develop new tools for the electronic dissemination of scholarly research. Among its projects are eScholarship and a partnership with bepress.
  • Home page, http://www.cdlib.org/.
  • CDL FAQ, http://www.cdlib.org/about/faq/.

    Campaign for the Freedom of Distribution of Scientific Work.
    An early (1998-2000) FOS initiative from Stefano Ghirlanda. The campaign focused on lessening the restrictions of copyright agreements for scientific literature. Also called the Free Science Campaign.
  • Home page, http://ethology.intercult.su.se/freescience/.

    Canadian Electronic Scholarly Network (CESN).
    A network of support and communication for Canadian electronic journals. It also provides a web presence for the Electronic Publishing Promotion Project (although the EPPP also has its own web site).
  • Home page, http://www.schoolnet.ca/vp-pv/cesn/e/.

    Catchword.
    Producer of electronic journals for print publishers. Generally the Catchword journals are not available free of charge. However, for every journal it produces Catchword supports free current awareness for tables of contents. Currently it produces over 1,100 electronic journals.
  • Home page, http://www.catchword.com/.

    CCIP. See Coalition for Public Information (Coalition Canadienne de L'Information Publique).

    CDI. See Content Directions, Inc.

    CDLR. See Centre for Digital Library Research.

    CEDARS. See CURL Exemplars for Digital Archives.

    Centre for Digital Library Research (CDLR).
    A research center at the University of Strathclyde. Among its projects is INSPIRAL (more below).
  • Home page, http://cdlr.strath.ac.uk/.
  • See the CDLR's long list of projects, http://cdlr.strath.ac.uk/projects/projects.html.

    Center for the Public Domain.
    A philanthropic organization funding projects to enhance America's "commons" or public domain, including free digital content and efforts to counteract recent trends in copyright and patent law. Among its projects is ibiblio.
  • Home page, http://www.centerforthepublicdomain.org/.

    CESN. See Canadian Electronic Scholarly Network.

    cIDf. See Content ID Forum.

    Cite-Base Search.
    A search engine for OAI-compliant archives. It also reveals the citation impact of the papers in its index. From Tim Brody and OpCit.
  • Home page, http://citebase.eprints.org/.

    CiteSeer.
    Former name of ResearchIndex.

    CLIR. See Council on Library and Information Resources.

    CNI. See Coalition for Networked Information.

    CNRI. See Corporation for National Research Initiatives.

    Coalition for Networked Information (CNI).
    A coalition of 200+ member organizations dedicated to improving scholarly communication and productivity. Many of its projects address the economics and technology of the infrastructure of networked scholarly communication. Among its programs is NINCH. CNI is a program of ARL and Educause.
  • Home page, http://www.cni.org/.

    Coalition for Public Information (CPI).
    A coalition of public interest organizations "whose mandate is to foster universal access to affordable, useable information and communications services and technology". Founded in 1993 as part of the Ontario Library Association and spun off as a separate organization in 1996, it has apparently been inactive since 1999. The French name is Coalition Canadienne de L'Information Publique (CCIP). Sometimes the organization is known by the dual English-French acronym, CPI-CCIP.
  • Home page, http://www.canarie.ca/cpi/.

    CogPrints.
    An OAI-compliant eprint archive for the field of cognitive science. It developed and now oversees the eprints archiving software. Funded by JISC as part of its eLib program.
  • Home page, http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/.

    Community Research and Development Information Service (CORDIS).
    A service from the European Union to provide free online access to EU-funded research. Among its programs are eContent and FP5 with all its many subsidiary programs.
  • Home page, http://www.cordis.lu/en/home.html.

    Comprehensive Access to Printed Materials (CAPM).
    A project from the Johns Hopkins University library to use robotics, telecommunications, scanners, and special software to allow web-based browsing of a library collection of printed works shelved at an off-campus storage facility. Funded by the Mellon Foundation and the Minolta Corporation.
  • Home page, http://dkc.mse.jhu.edu/CAPM/.

    Consortium of University Research Libraries (CURL).
    A consortium of UK research libraries dedicated to the improvement of libraries and their resources for learning and research. Among its projects is CEDARS.
  • Home page, http://www.curl.ac.uk/.

    Contemporary Culture Virtual Archives in XML (COVAX).
    A free online archive of contemporary European culture, and a project to create an interoperable network of archives of primary sources in the history of European culture and science. COVAX will operate a cross-archive metasearch engine over distributed native XML databases. Funded by the European Commission through IST.
  • Home page, http://www.covax.org.

    Content Directions, Inc. (CDI).
    A DOI registration agency. This means that it can assign DOI prefixes to publishers, register DOIs, and facilitate the creation and revision of metadata associated with a DOI. Also a consultant to publishers on how they can best use the DOI system. Among its projects is MICI.
  • Home page, http://www.contentdirections.com/.

    Content ID Forum (cIDf).
    A non-profit organization to promote Content ID, a metadata standard for identifying digital contents for the purposes of electronic commerce. cIDf is working with IDF to harmonize the Content ID standard with the DOI standard.
  • Home page, http://www.cidf.org/.

    Contextual linking.
    Links on a web page that take users to the appropriate copies of the resources listed on the page, e.g. giving preference to copies stored locally at the user's institution or for which the user's institution has bought licenses. Also called local, localized, or context-sensitive linking. For one technology to provide contextual linking, see OpenURL.

    CORDIS. See Community Research and Development Information Service

    Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI).
    A non-profit corporation doing research for the public interest into network-based information technologies. Among its projects are D-Lib Magazine, the DOI initiative, and the National Digital Library Program.
  • Home page, http://www.cnri.reston.va.us/.

    Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR).
    An association devoted to the long-term accessibility of scholarly literature. It sponsors programs in preserving literature, making it affordable, and helping to create and support new forms of digital electronic literature. One of its programs is DLF.
  • Home page, http://www.clir.org/.

    COVAX. See Contemporary Culture Virtual Archives in XML.

    CPI. See Coalition for Public Information.

    The Craft.
    A scholarly journal that publishes articles on FOS-related topics. Its subtitle:  Evolving the Art and Science of Electronic Scholarly Publication.
  • Home page, http://www.icaap.org/TheCraft/.

    Create Change.
    A collection of strategies for librarians and researchers to protest high subscription prices for scholarly journals and to assist journals in finding publishing options better suited to their academic missions. From ARL, ACRL, and SPARC as part of the Declaring Independence campaign.
  • Home page, http://www.createchange.org/home.html.

    Cross Archive Search Engine.
    A search engine that indexes data stored in more than one database or archive. This allows dividing the labor of maintaining the separate archives (among independent groups organized by subject expertise or regional authority), scaling up to include relevant new archives as they emerge, and freeing users from the need to run separate searches across the separate archives.

    Cross Archive Searching Service (ARC).
    A cross-archive search engine for OAI-compliant archives. From the Digital Library Research group of Old Dominion University.
  • Home page, http://arc.cs.odu.edu/.

    CrossRef.
    A non-profit corporation working to to automate reference linking across publishers, i.e. to link bibliographic and footnote citations to full-text sources. CrossRef is the first and so far the only complete application of the DOI system. CrossRef aims to interlink all online scholarship. Operated by PILA. Launched in June 2000. Now also a DOI registration agency.
  • Home page, http://www.crossref.org/.
  • Starting in January 2002, CrossRef was compatible with SFX. This means that at sites using both technologies, the reference links provided by CrossRef will take the user's licenses into account as determined by SFX. This solves the appropriate copy problem for reference links.

    CSG. See Current Science Group.

    Cultivate Interactive.
    A scholarly journal which occasionally covers FOS issues. Funded by Digicult and UKOLN.
  • Home page, http://www.cultivate-int.org/.

    CURL. See Consortium of University Research Libraries.

    CURL Exemplars for Digital Archives (CEDARS).
    A project to develop strategies for the long-term preservation of digital content. It will produce guidelines, demonstration projects to test the guidelines, and economic analysis of implementing the guidelines. Uses OAIS. From CURL with funding from JISC as part of its eLib program.
  • Home page, http://www.leeds.ac.uk/cedars/.
  • CURL page on CEDARS, http://www.curl.ac.uk/projects/cedars.html.

    Current awareness.
    Notification when something of interest happens at an information source. Nowadays current awareness tends to be automated and use email. For example, online journals can provide email notification that new issues have been published, or they can provide tables of contents, full-text articles, or updated results to stored searches. Some journals offer current awareness to the public at no charge, while others limit it to paying subscribers. Some print journals with no free online content offer free, automated current awareness.

    Current Science Group (CSG).
    A group of independent companies collaborating to publish and distribute information in the biomedical sciences. Among its members is BioMed Central.
  • Home page, http://www.current-science-group.com/.

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    D

    D3E. See Digital Document Discourse Environment.

    D-Lib Magazine.
    A scholarly journal occasionally covering FOS issues. Hosted by CNRI and sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as part of the Digital Libraries Initiative.
  • Home page, http://www.dlib.org/.

    DC. See Dublin Core.

    DCMI. See Dublin Core Metadata Initiative.

    DDC. See Directory of Digital Collections.

    Declaration of Havana.
    Full title:  Declaration of Havana Towards Equitable Access to Health Information. A statement issued in Havana on April 27, 2001, by the participants in the Second Regional Coordination Meeting of the Virtual Health Library and the Fifth Regional Congress on Health Sciences Information from Bireme. One of the strongest public statements in support of FOS. It opens with the principle that "scientific-technical information is a global public good essential for social development, and...[its] universal and equitable dissemination should be assured by national and international public policies." Another section asserts that "the unjust, unnecessary and avoidable" health differences among individuals and groups are due in part to "inequitable access to health information and knowledge". The remedy for both health inequalities and poverty is political participation, which in turn depends on "access to information and communication". One purpose of the declaration is to marshal support for the Virtual Health Library. Also see the Declaration of San José.
  • Home page, http://www.bireme.br/crics5/I/declara.htm

    Declaration of San José.
    Full title:  Declaration of San José Towards the Virtual Health Library. A statement issued in San José, Costa Rica, on March 27, 1998, by the delegates of the Latin American and Caribbean System on Health Sciences Information (Bireme). The statement asserts that "access to information" is one of the "essential elements" of health, well-being, equity of living conditions, and development. The signatories pledged to create the Virtual Health Library. Also see the Declaration of Havana.
  • Home page, http://www.bireme.br/bvs/por/ideclar.htm.

    Declaring Independence.
    A campaign to inform journal editors of their publishing options, and to help them move to an option which will best serve their academic mission. In practice, this means moving from a publisher charging high subscription prices to one charging significantly less. It often means moving from print to the internet. The campaign consists of a handbook and a web site, Create Change. Sponsored by SPARC and the Triangle Research Libraries Network.
  • Home page, http://www.arl.org/sparc/DI/.
  • See my list of known examples of journals declaring independence, http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/lists.htm#declarations.

    Deep Internet.
    That portion of the internet stored in online databases. Also called the invisible internet. These pages are "invisible" in the sense that they are not crawled by standard search engines, but they are quite visible to their own search engines which may well be accessible on the web to all users. Without special software, then, separate databases must be searched separately. By some estimates, the deep internet is 500 times larger than the surface internet. Many scholarly archives lie in the deep internet.

    DELOS. See Network of Excellence on Digital Libraries.

    Developing Nations Initiatives.
    A list of projects to disseminate free or affordable scholarly journals to, or from, developing countries, or both. Maintained by Ann Okerson for the LibLicense (Licensing Digital Information) discussion list.
  • Home page, http://www.library.yale.edu/~llicense/develop.shtml.

    Diffuse Project.
    A continuously updated compendium of evolving standards for the exchange of information, and guides to their application. Funded by IST (hence CORDIS), and implemented by TIEKE (Finnish Information Society Development Centre), IC Focus, and The SGML Centre.
  • Home page, http://www.diffuse.org/.
  • List of organizations promulgating standards, http://www.diffuse.org/fora.html.
  • List of the standards themselves, http://www.diffuse.org/standards.html.

    Digicult. See Digital Heritage and Cultural Content.

    DigiNews.
    A bimonthly newsletter that frequently publishes FOS-related news. From RLG.
  • Home page, http://www.rlg.org/preserv/diginews/.

    Digital Divide.
    The disparity between the rich and the poor in their access to computers, digital information, and the benefits these make possible. To see why this is relevant to FOS, let's distinguish the hardware and software versions of the digital divide. The hardware problem is to get computers and telephone lines (or wireless infrastructure) to the under-served parts of the world. The software problem is to get content, including academic content, online and free of charge so that it will be accessible to those who succeed in solving the hardware problem. The FOS movement is largely about widening access to scholarly literature. While the FOS movement addresses the academic part of the software problem, those working to bridge the digital divide are addressing the hardware problem.
  • Major players addressing the hardware problem include the Benton Foundation and the DOT Force.

    Digital Document Discourse Environment (D3E).
    An open source tool for peer review and commentary. It creates a threaded discussion attached to any web page. "Full D3E" uses a toolkit to insert navigation links and discussion hooks into the target document. "Ubiquitous D3E" uses unmodified files in their natural habitat on the web. D3E discussions support multiple threads, moderators, discussion subscription, searching, email delivery, HTML within posts, look and feel control, usage statistics, and other standard features of major discussion forums. D3E is a collaboration of the Knowledge Media Institute of the UK's Open University and the Center for LifeLong Learning & Design of the University of Colorado at Boulder.
  • Home page, http://d3e.open.ac.uk/.

    Digital Heritage and Cultural Content (Digicult).
    One of the major program areas of IST (hence CORDIS). Among its projets are Cultivate Interactive and METAe.
  • Home page, http://www.cordis.lu/ist/ka3/digicult/home.html.

    Digital Information in the Information Research Field.
    A comprehensive index of free online sources of information and research in the fields of information management, information science, and information systems. Maintained by Tom Wilson.
  • Home page, http://informationr.net/fr/freejnls.html.

    Digital Libraries Initiative (DLI).
    An initiative coordinated by several federal agencies to provide research and technology for the next generation of digital libraries. DLI is now in Phase 2. Phase 1 lasted from 1994 to 1998. Sponsored by National Science Foundation, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), National Library of Medicine, the Library of Congress, National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
  • Home page, http://www.dli2.nsf.gov/.
  • The Library of Congress page on the DLI, http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/dli2/index.html

    Digital Library Federation (DLF).
    An association of research libraries dedicated to creating, maintaining, expanding, and preserving digital online scholarship. Operated by CLIR. One of its projects is to assist the Library of Congress with the National Digital Library Program. Among its other projects is METS.
  • Home page, http://www.clir.org/diglib/dlfhomepage.htm.

    Digital Object Identifier (DOI).
    A permanent identifying number for an online journal, article, image, citation, applet, script, or other digital "object". Because it identifies the object, it differs from a URL, which identifies the object's location, and it remains the same even when the object's URL changes. DOIs are for online content roughly what ISBNs are for books. To be more precise, the DOI includes an identifying number, associated metadata, and a system to deliver the digital object to users who know or click on its identifying number.
  • The International DOI Foundation (IDF) maintains a directory connecting DOIs with URLs and other metadata. The DOI standard includes syntax for turning a DOI into a URL pointing to the object's directory entry, which will redirect the user to the object's current location on the web. Those who hold intellectual property rights in online objects control the DOIs of those objects. If users link to documents through their DOIs, and if publishers update the DOI directory when their documents move, then links don't die and objects have (in effect) permanent URLs.
  • DOIs are translated or "resolved" into URLs by the Handle System created by CNRI. Recently DOIs became capable of multiple resolution. Users who click on a DOI link supporting multiple resolution are shown a pop-up menu of eligible destinations, which could include locations of various copies of the object, online stores selling the object, free excerpts of documents available in full-text only for pay, the object's metadata file, or other pertinent information.
  • Every participating publisher has a unique number called its "prefix" used in its DOIs. Acquiring a prefix from a DOI registration agency is not free, but is a one-time charge. Readers use DOIs free of charge, but need a free browser plug-in to resolve DOIs.
  • A DOI "registration agency" can assign a prefix to a publisher, register DOIs, and provide the infrastructure used by publishers to modify the metadata associated with a DOI. The International DOI Foundation was the only registration agency for some time, but now there are others. See Content Directions, CrossRef, Enpia Systems, and Learning Objects Network.
  • Created by the AAP, IPA, STM, and CNRI, and now administered by the IDF. Governance is open; any interested party may join the IDF and particpate. Now part of the wider INDECS initiative. The official DOI standard has been issued by NISO.
  • DOIs underlie the CrossRef service, which provides automatic reference linking (interlinking citations to the sources they cite).
  • Home page, http://www.doi.org/index.html.
  • DOI FAQ, http://www.doi.org/faq.html.
  • Browser plug-in for resolving DOIs, http://www.handle.net/resolver/index.html.

    Digital Opportunity Task Force (DOT Force).
    An international organization devoted to closing the digital divide. Sponsored by the United Nations Develpment Program and the World Bank.
  • Home page, http://www.dotforce.org/.

    Digital Preservation Commons (DPC).
    A joint project OCLC and RLG designed to identify and support the best methods for the long-term preservation of digital texts, especially those in large heterogeneous archives of research papers.
  • Home page, http://www.oclc.org/digitalpreservation/.

    Digital Promise Project.
    A proposal to create an $18 billion endowment for technology, training, and online digital content to enhance education in the United States. The money would come from the sale of certain bands of radio spectrum.
  • Home page, http://www.digitalpromise.org/.

    Digital Rights Management (DRM).
    Software that stands between online information and requesting users. If users meet the program's criteria (e.g. they are paying subscribers), then it will allow them secure access to the information. For other users, it will block access. DRM technology can take many approaches, including encryption, user-identifying metadata, and plug-ins for the user's browser.

    Directory of Digital Collections (DDC).
    A search engine aspiring to cover all the digitized cultural heritage collections in the world. New collections may add themselves through a link at the site. Sponsored by UNESCO's Memory of the World program and IFLA.
  • Home page, http://thoth.bl.uk/.

    Directory of Scholarly Electronic Journals and Academic Discussion Lists.
    A large directory of online scholarly content. From ARL. Not free.
  • Home page, http://arl.cni.org/scomm/edir/.

    Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER).
    A growing collection of electronic scholarship from many sources. DNER is concerned with quality, access, preservation, and price. While DNER wants scholarly journals to be digital and available over the internet, it does not require that they be free, only affordable. Limited to the UK. Among its projects are EBONI and RDN. Funded by JISC.
  • Home page, http://www.jisc.ac.uk/dner/.
  • DNER FAQ, http://www.jisc.ac.uk/dner/information/faqs.html.

    DLF. See Digital Library Federation.

    DLI. See Digital Libraries Initiative.

    DNER. See Distributed National Electronic Resource.

    DOI. See Digital Object Identifier.

    DOT Force. See Digital Opportunity Task Force.

    DP9.
    An open source gateway service that allows general search engines, like Google, to index OAI-compliant archives. It stands between the crawler and the archive, intercepts the crawler's requests, forwards them to the archive, and translates the output from XML into HTML. This allows OAI archives hidden in the deep internet to be indexed by search engines that don't venture into the deep internet. DP9 was developed by Xiaoming Liu of the Old Dominion University DLib Group.
  • Home page, http://arc.cs.odu.edu:8080/dp9/index.jsp.

    DPC. See Digital Preservation Commons.

    DRM. See Digital Rights Management.

    DSpace.
    An online digital archive for the roughly 10,000 scholarly articles, images, and digital objects produced each year by the faculty and researchers of MIT. The archive contents will be available free of charge, usually to the whole world, although authors will have the right to limit access to MIT users. Preprints may also become inaccessible after they have been submitted or published elsewhere. The planners hope to make all the code creating the site open source, although in the short term they may have to use some closed modules licensed from others. Funded by Hewlett-Packard. What sets DSpace apart from other archives is the commitment to capture all the (faculty) intellectual output of an institution, and the corporate partnership which does not introduce fees for users.
  • Home page, http://web.mit.edu/dspace/.
  • DSpace FAQ, http://web.mit.edu/dspace/live/about_us/faqs/index.html. (Unusually clear and candid.)

    Dublin Core (DC).
    One of the oldest and most widely accepted international metadata standards. Dublin Core metadata can describe both electronic and non-electronic resources. Named for the 1995 conference in Dublin, Ohio (not Dublin, Ireland), where it was first elaborated. The conference was hosted by OCLC and NCSA. The evolution of the standard is now supervised by the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative. The standard was approved by American National Standards Institute (ANSI) in October 2001.
  • The closest thing to a Dublin Core home page is that for the DCMI, http://dublincore.org/.
  • DC metadata can be generated "by hand" or by software. For web-based software to generate DC metadata for a web page, see UKOLN's DC Dot, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/dcdot/.
  • See the DCMI's long list of the projects using the Dublin Core, http://uk.dublincore.org/projects/.

    Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI).
    A non-profit organization developing metadata standards to facilitate resource discovery, and promoting the adoption of interoperable metadata standards.
  • Home page, http://dublincore.org/.
  • The DCMI FAQ, http://uk.dublincore.org/resources/faq/.

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    E

    E-Biomed.
    A free online archive for the biomedical fields proposed in 1999 by Harold Varmus. It would contain both unrefereed preprints and refereed postprints. Peer review would be done by E-Biomed editorial boards. Copyrights would be retained by authors on condition that authors consent to the free distribution of their works. The system would be managed by a Governing Board on which all stakeholders would have a seat:  researchers, editors, computer specialists, and funding agencies. The idea came to life only some time after (February 2000) the name was changed (August 30, 1999) to PubMed Central, and only with some important changes, such as dropping preprints.
  • The former E-Biomed home page now simply redirects users to PubMed Central.
  • Here is the paper in which Varmus proposed E-Biomed, http://www.nih.gov/about/director/pubmedcentral/ebiomedarch.htm.
  • Here's a paper by Rob Kling on the evolution of E-Biomed into PubMed Central, http://www.slis.indiana.edu/csi/WP/wp01-03B.html.

    EAN. See European Archival Network.

    EBONI. See Electronic Books On-Screen Interface.

    ebook.
    An electronic book. Its text may be available on the web, on a disk or CD, or in a downloadable file for an ebook reader.

    ebrary.
    A publisher of electronic scholarship. It creates partnerships with academic print publishers, including university presses, and makes their works available online in PDF format. Users may browse or read these online editions free of charge, but must pay to download or print them. They may highlight as much or as little as they wish to download or print, and then are charged at "photocopying rates" (about 25 cents per page). The ASCII version of the content can be crawled by search engines so that it is freely searchable. Founded in February 1999 by Christopher Warnock and Kevin Sayar.
  • Home page, http://www.ebrary.com/.

    EBSCO.
    EBSCO is an acronym for the Elton B. Stephens Company, but the company is never called by its full name. A publisher of electronic books, journals, and databases in many academic fields. Also includes EBSCO Net (serials management system), EBSCO Online (e-journal access and management), EBSCO Host (online bibliographic and full-text database using CrossRef), and EBSCO Books (online book procurement service). Almost none of this is available free of charge. However, among its projects is EIFL Direct.
  • Home page of EBSCO Publishing, http://www.epnet.com/.
  • EBSCO Information Services, http://www-us.ebsco.com/home/default.asp.

    eContent.
    An initiative to produce and disseminate online European digital content in many languages. From CORDIS.
  • Home page, http://www.cordis.lu/econtent/.

    Educause.
    An international non-profit organization dedicated to the use of information resources and technology to transform teaching and research. One of the two sponsors, with ARL, of CNI.
  • Home page, http://www.educause.edu/.

    eIFL Direct. See Electronic Information for Libraries Direct.

    ejournal.
    An electronic journal. Its text may be available on the web, on a disk or CD, or in a downloadable file for an ebook reader.

    Electronic Books On-Screen Interface (EBONI).
    A research project into the most effective use of hyperlinks, tables of contents, indices, graphics, frames, tables, color, and other navigation aids and organizational structures, for the purpose of teaching and learning. Funded by JISC as part of DNER.
  • Home page, http://eboni.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/.

    Electronic Information for Libraries Direct (eIFL Direct).
    A program launched in 1999 to subsidize access to online scholarly journals in 39 countries from the former Soviet bloc, Africa, and Latin America. The journals come from five EBSCO databases, and the subsidies from George Soros' Open Society Institute. The program encompasses over 5,000 full-text journals, and serves over 2,000 libraries and research institutions. The most indigent institutions have free access, while others pay greatly reduced prices. Initially the program focused on journals in the humanities, social sciences, education, business, and law, but has since expanded to cover STM journals as well. With some justice it calls itself the largest information consortium in the world. eIFL is to become an independent foundation in 2002, funded by OSI and additional agencies still being sought. OSI is explicit that the problem eIFL solves is partly caused by political repression and partly by exorbitant subscription prices charged by for-profit publishers.
  • Home page, http://www.eifl.net/.
  • eIFL FAQ, http://soros.epnet.com/eifl_description.html.

    Electronic Publishers Coalition (EPC).
    A trade association of ebook publishers. However, it will surprise you. For example, unlike the AAP, the EPC condemned the use of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act to prosecute Dmitry Sklyarov (July 2001) for writing software to bypass the copy protection on Adobe ebooks.
  • Home page, http://www.epccentral.org/index.html.

    Electronic Publishing Promotion Project (EPPP).
    An initiative to produce home-grown, electronic, non-profit, scholarly journals in Canada. Part of Industry Canada's SchoolNet project.
  • Home page, http://www.schoolnet.ca/vp-pv/cesn/e/eppp.htm.

    Electronic Publishing Trust for Development (EPT).
    A England-based trust established in 1996 to promote free online access to scientific literature, especially in biomedicine. Its main focus is to help bring the world's research literature to developing countries and to bring literature from developing countries to the rest of the world.
  • Home page, http://www.epublishingtrust.org/

    Electronic Society for Social Scientists (ELSSS).
    A non-profit society dedicated to the production of low-cost electronic scholarly journals in the social sciences, particularly in economics. Its journals are not free, but they do pay authors and referees, let authors keep the copyright in their articles, and give subscriptions free to libraries in developing countries.
  • Home page, http://www.elsss.org.uk/.

    Electronic Libraries Programme (eLib).
    A publicly funded effort in the UK to develop an electronic library to serve higher education. Among its projects are CEDARS, CogPrints, HEADLINE, HEDS, the Open Journal Project, and the SuperJournal Project. A program of JISC.
  • Home page, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/.

    eLib. See Electronic Libraries Programme.

    ELSSS. See Electronic Society for Social Scientists.

    Embargo Policies.
    Rules adopted by a journal about what kinds of prior publication, publicity, or internet presence will disqualify a submitted paper for consideration. See Ingelfinger Rule.

    Enpia Systems.
    A DOI registration agency. This means that it can assign DOI prefixes to publishers, register DOIs, and facilitate the creation and revision of metadata associated with a DOI.
  • Home page, http://www.enpia.com/.

    EPC. See Electronic Publishers Coalition.

    EPPP. See Electronic Publishing Promotion Project.

    Eprint.
    An electronic preprint or postprint. The term "e-print" (with the hyphen) was coined in 1992 by Greg Lawler, and originally referred only to electronic preprints. Paul Ginsparg later generalized it to mean author self-archived electronic preprints or postprints.

    Eprint Archiving.
    Another term for self-archiving.

    eprints.
    Free software to create an empty OAI-compliant archive to be filled with content by an individual scholar or institution. Written by Rob Tansley and later upgraded and maintained by Chris Gutteridge. Based on the CogPrints software, which was written by Matt Hemus and redesigned and made OAI-compliant by Rob Tansley. Both the eprints and CogPrints programs were written according to specs laid down by Stevan Harnad. Originally supported by CogPrints but now supported by JISC as part of the Open Citation Project and by NSF.
  • Home page, http://www.eprints.org/.
  • Discussion forum for eprints users, http://community.eprints.org/phpBB/.
  • Review of eprints based on an eight month test at CalTech, http://www.arl.org/sparc/core/index.asp?page=g20#6.

    EPT. See Electronic Publishing Trust for Development.

    ERCIM. See European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics.

    eScholarship.
    An initiative to facilitate scholar-led innovations in scholarly communication. eScholarship promotes free online disciplinary archives, software tools for the submission, peer-review, access, and discovery of scholarly articles, and new services to accompany the archives, such as alerting, citation, and annotation services. eScholarship's online archives are built with the eprints software and are all OAI-compliant. A project of the University of California's CDL, with additional funding from SPARC.
  • Home page, http://escholarship.cdlib.org/.

    ETD-MS. See Interoperability Metadata Standard for Electronic Theses and Dissertations.

    European Archival Network (EAN).
    Hosts and provides searching services for cultural heritage archives from 49 European countries, as well as some archives elsewhere.
  • Home page, http://www.european-archival.net/.

    European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM).
    An international organization whose mission is to foster cooperation among European researchers and collaboration between them and industry. One of its projects is DELOS.
  • Home page, http://www.ercim.org/.

    Ex Libris.
    Producer of automated library systems, for example SFX and OpenURL.
  • Home page, http://www.exlibris-usa.com/.

    Ex Libris.
    A portal to special library collections provided the collections are accessible on the web free of charge. Founded in 1991.
  • Home page, http://www.exlib.org/.

    Extensible Mark-up Language (XML).
    A mark-up language for indicating the kinds of information in a text. Relevant to FOS because it is a natural language for coding metadata. It can facilitate information discovery and retrieval, document printing and display in a wide variety of formats, and (for this reason) digital preservation.
  • The W3C page on XML, http://www.w3.org/XML/.
  • The Diffuse page on XML, http://www.diffuse.org/xmlguide.html.
  • Northern Light page on XML, http://special.northernlight.com/xml/
  • The OASIS page on XML, http://www.oasis-open.org/cover/.

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    F

    FP5. See Fifth Framework Programme.

    FP6. See Sixth Framework Programme.

    FAQ. See Frequently Asked Questions.

    Faustian Bargain.
    Stevan Harnad's term for the pact authors had to make with publishers in the era of print, namely, to let publishers charge access tolls for the author's work in exchange for publishing it at all. In the print era, Harnad argues, this was only justified because it was necessary. In the digital era, it is not necessary and therefore not justified. See Harnad's description of the bargain and its alternative, http://www.arl.org/scomm/subversive/sub01.html.

    Fifth Framework Programme (FP5).
    A program to conduct research and technological development funded by the European Union. Among its projects are METAe and IST. From CORDIS. The Sixth Framework Programme is now being developed.
  • Home page, http://www.cordis.lu/fp5/home.html.

    FirstSearch.
    A unified front end to 75+ academic databases, from OCLC. Many but not all of the participating databases are also produced by OCLC. Not free.
  • Home page, http://newfirstsearch.oclc.org/.
  • FirstSearch FAQ, http://www.oclc.org/firstsearch/faq/index.htm.

    FMJ. See Free Medical Journals.

    FOS. See Free Online Scholarship.

    Free Medical Journals.
    A web site collecting links to medical journals that offer their contents online free of charge. In addition to linking to free online medical journals, the site classsifies them by the lag time between print publication and free online access (no lag time, one year, two years, etc.), and by language. It also sorts them within each category by impact factors. Maintained by Bernd Sebastian Kamps.
  • Home page, http://www.freemedicaljournals.com/.
  • Kamps' strong pro-FOS statement of FMJ's philosophy, http://www.freemedicaljournals.com/htm/phil.htm. (Kamps is also the senior editor of Amedeo.)

    Free Online Scholarship (FOS).
    I use this as the generic term for scholarly literature in the sciences or humanities available free of charge on the internet. I turned to a new term only reluctantly because there was no general term already accepted for this kind of literature, although since the launch of the Budapest Open Access Initiative (2/14/02), the term open access has spread widely. "FOS" can also be used as an adjective, as in "FOS initiatives" and "FOS issues". See the FOS Newsletter.
  • One person's more detailed elaboration of FOS, http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/index.htm#editorial.
  • FOS Timeline, http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/timeline.htm. Chronology of major events in the FOS movement.

    Free Online Scholarship Newsletter.
    An informal newsletter on developments in the migration of print scholarship to the internet, efforts to make online scholarship accessible to readers free of charge, and other FOS issues. Published sporadically by Peter Suber.
  • Home page, http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/.
  • FOS News blog, http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html. A weblog of FOS news, taking over some of the load from the FOS Newsletter.

    Free Science Campaign. See Campaign for the Freedom of Distribution of Scientific Work.

    Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ).
    A list of common questions and their answers, to save time for both the questioner and the answerer. There is no single FAQ for the FOS movement, but here are some of major compilations of questions and answers, or objections and replies.
  • The Budapest Open Access Initiative FAQ, http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm. While this FAQ addresses only one initiative, it covers much of the FOS movement. (Full disclosure:  I helped write it.)
  • The Scholarly Communication FAQ from Create Change, http://www.arl.org/create/faculty/faq/scomm.html.
  • The eprints Self-Archiving FAQ, http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/selfaq.htm.

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    G

    Government Printing Office (GPO).
    The official publisher of the U.S. government. It gives free online access to prodigious amounts of government information. One of its other projects (with OCLC) is Web Document Digital Archive.
  • Home page, http://www.access.gpo.gov/.

    Gov.Research Center (GRC).
    Online access to government information in the sciences and technology. It is not free. Sponsored by the National Information Services Corp. and the National Technical Information Service.
  • Home page, http://grc.ntis.gov/.

    GRC. See Gov.Research Center.

    Grey Literature.
    Some definitions cover all literature not controlled by commercial publishers, in which case most FOS would be grey literature. Other definitions cover only literature less formal than refereed, published scholarship, in which case most FOS would not be grey literature. Apart from this difference, the definitions agree that grey literature includes preprints, committee reports, working papers, conference proceedings, and dissertations. Non-academic grey literature includes government reports, business plans, market reports, and press releases.

    GPO. See Government Printing Office.

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    H

    Handle system.
    Software and the corresponding protocol to convert (technically, "resolve") a name into the URL or other metadatum of the object named. The most important application is to resolve a DOI into its URL. It allows the name to remain fixed while the URL and other metadata about the named object undergo change. From CNRI.
  • Home page, http://www.handle.net/.

    HeadLine. See Hybrid Electronic Access and Delivery in the Library Networked Environment.

    Health InterNetwork Access to Research Initiative (HINARI).
    A program coordinated by the World Health Organization, and launched by it in collaboration with the Open Society Institute in which commercial publishers offer tiered pricing for their online biomedical journals. Nations in the bottom tier (per capita GNP below $1000) pay nothing. The top tier pays full price, and the middle tier pays at a discount.
  • Home page, http://www.healthinternetwork.org/scipub.php.

    HEDS. See Higher Education Digitisation Service.

    Higher Education Digitisation Service (HEDS).
    A service to digitize texts and images from paper or microfilm for universities and other non-profit institutions. It is one of many organizations working on METAe. Funded by JISC as part of eLib.
  • Home page, http://heds.herts.ac.uk/.

    HighWire Press.
    Publisher of the second largest free online archive of full-text science papers (after the NASA Astrophysics Data System). Founded in 1995, HighWire produces the electronic editions of a large number of print journals in the sciences, especially the biomedical fields. These journals have varying policies on how much of their content will be freely available online and how soon after print publication. From the Stanford University Libraries.
  • Home page, http://highwire.stanford.edu/.
  • Beta of new home page, http://mywire.stanford.edu/.
  • List of HighWire journals, http://highwire.stanford.edu/lists/freeart.dtl.

    HINARI. See Health InterNetwork Access to Research Initiative.

    Hippias.
    A search engine for free online scholarship and other content in the field of philosophy. Hippias is peer-reviewed in the sense that the items in its index are limited to those which have been accepted by its board of editors. (Full disclosure:  I am the general editor.) From Noetic Labs.
  • Home page, http://hippias.evansville.edu/.

    History and Theory of Psychology Eprint Archive (HTP Prints).
    An eprint archive for psychology and the history of psychology. In addition to preprints, it will publish papers not suited to traditional journals in the field, e.g. conference papers, highly illustrated papers, longer essays, literature reviews, papers with a highly specific focus). The archive is OAI-compliant. HTP Prints does not perform peer review on its contents.
  • Home page, http://htpprints.yorku.ca/.

    History E-Book Project.
    A project to digitize 500 backlist monographs in history, and 85 new titles, and in the process to create templates, technologies, and experience that will apply to other scholarly monographs. The resulting texts will be available online but not for free. Funded by the Mellon Foundation and administered by the ACLS.
  • Home page, http://www.historyebook.org/.

    HTP Prints. See History and Theory of Psychology Eprint Archive.

    Hybrid Electronic Access and Delivery in the Library Networked Environment (HeadLine).
    A project to implement a model hybrid (print + digital) library. The three year project ended in July, 2001, and all its reports, newsletters, presentations, articles, and software are available at its web site. Funded by JISC as part of eLib.
  • Home page, http://www.headline.ac.uk/.

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    I

    ibiblio.
    A large collection of free resources on the internet, including software, music, and scholarship in literature, art, history, science, politics, and cultural studies. Funded by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the Center for the Public Domain.
  • Home page, http://www.ibiblio.org/.

    ICA. See International Council on Archives.

    ICAAP. See International Consortium for the Advancement of Academic Publication.

    ICOLC. See International Coalition of Library Consortia.

    ICSTI. See International Council for Scientific and Technical Information.

    ICSU. See International Council for Science.

    IDEAL. See International Digital Electronic Access Library.

    IDF. See International DOI Foundation.

    IFLA. See International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions.

    IFWA. See Immediate Free Web Access.

    Immediate Free Web Access (IFWA).
    Thomas Walker's proposed name (early 2000) for the sort of reader access that authors should request for their articles from journals. The term was adopted by the Florida Entomological Society, and has been used in the American Scientist forum, in Nature (April 2001), and in The Scientist (June 2001), but unfortunately has not caught on more widely.

    IMLS. See Institute of Museum and Library Services.

    Impact.
    The influence of a work of scholarship on other scholars in the field. If increased access leads to increased impact (not necessarily through a simple function), then making works of scholarship freely accessible online will increase their impact. This conclusion is controversial, as are various proposed methods for measuring impact.

    INASP. See International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications.

    INDECS. See Interoperability of Data in E-Commerce.

    Information Society Technologies Programme (IST).
    Agency of the European Union for helping individuals and enterprises realize the benefits of the information age. Among its projects are Arion, COVAX, DELOS, Diffuse, Digicult, NESSTAR, Renardus, TIPS, Torii, and others (see below). A program of FP5 and CORDIS.
  • Home page, http://www.cordis.lu/ist/.
  • See the long list of IST projects, http://www.cordis.lu/ist/projects.htm.

    InfoMed. See Project InfoMed.

    InfoTrieve.
    A large repository of for-pay journal articles online. Users can search the collection free of charge, but must pay to read full-text, which they can choose to receive electronically (by email) or in print (by fax, first-class mail, or courier). Users can locate articles in over 35,000 scholarly journals, and find full-text to download in a smaller but growing number of journals. While only searching, and the resulting bibliographic citations are free, this was a step forward at the time. Before IntroTrieve licensed MedLine from the U.S. government, for example, users had to pay steep connect-time fees ($30-50/hour) to search it. Now it is freely searchable on the internet and users pay only to download articles.
  • Home page, http://www4.infotrieve.com/home.asp.

    Ingelfinger Rule.
    The policy adopted by some journals not to publish any article or research which has already been published or publicized elsewhere. Named after Franz Ingelfinger, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine. Journal rules on this subject are often called embargo policies.

    INSPIRAL. See Investigating Portals for Information Resources And Learning.

    Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).
    An independent agency of the U.S. federal government created in 1996 to support the nation's museums and libraries. Some of its grants fund digitization and free online content.
  • Home page, http://www.imls.gov/.
  • IMLS FAQ, http://www.imls.gov/about/abt_faqs.htm.

    Institute of Physics (IOP).
    London-based learned society and scientific publisher with many online services. One is to give free online access to the full-text of the current issues of each of its 29 physics journals, even to non-subscribers, as well as access to tables of contents, abstracts, and current awareness. Despite this, IOP can persuade a healthy number individuals and institutions to buy subscriptions by offering paying customers access to the electronic archive of past issues, links to cited and citing articles, and of course copies of the print edition.
  • Home page, http://www.iop.org/.

    Institutional Service Component (ISC).
    In an OpenURL environment, this is the code describing the user's institution or context and, hence, what rights of access the user has to certain sources of information. Hence, a component of contextual linking and a piece of the solution to the appropriate copy problem.

    Intellectual Property Conservancy (IPC).
    By analogy with land conservancies, a collection of intellectual property rights purchased from their owners, or donated by their owners, for the purpose of sharing the intellectual property with the public. An IPC would either put its information into the public domain or at least make it free for the public to access and read. This method of sharing information acknowledges that it is not a commons (by paying money for it) in order to make a commons out of it.
  • Because IPC is an idea, not an institution, it has no home page. But a good introduction to the idea can be found in this David Bearman D-Lib article from December 2000, http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december00/bearman/12bearman-full.html.

    Interactive Paper Project.
    A project to publish scholarly papers online in an interactive format. Readers could post "global" comments on the entire paper, more specific comments on any individual paragraph, or comments on any other comments. Readers could choose to read the primary text with the comments showing or only links to the comments showing. From the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign College of Education. The project was apparently abandoned in 1999.
  • Home page, http://lrsdb.ed.uiuc.edu:591/ipp/default.htm. The home-page still contains some working examples of interactive papers.

    International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM).
    Trade association of large and small STM publishers. One of the initial sponsors of the DOI initiative.
  • Home page, http://www.stm-assoc.org/.

    International Coalition of Library Consortia (ICOLC).
    A world-wide organization of library consortia. It has issued policy statements on DOIs, CrossRef, the appropriate copy problem, and the acquisition and lending of electronic information.
  • Home page, http://www.library.yale.edu/consortia/.

    International Consortium for the Advancement of Academic Publication (ICAAP).
    Non-profit organization devoted to the support of free and affordable online scholarly journals. It offers a wide array of free services to online journals, including hosting, traffic statistics, back-ups, search engine placement, promotion, discussion software, ICAAP's own flavor of SGML, metatag and MARC format generators, and database content delivery. (Full disclosure: I'm on the ICAAP board.)
  • Home page, http://www.icaap.org/.

    International Council for Science (ICSU).
    A non-governmental consortium of national science academies and research councils created to address interdisciplinary policy questions which no individual national or disciplinary organization could address as well alone.
  • Home page, http://www.icsu.org/.
  • ICSU-UNESCO statement of principles on electronic publishing in science, http://bestofscience.free.fr/icsu.html.

    International Council for Scientific and Technical Information (ICSTI).
    An international consortium of organizations that publish or use scientific information. Its mission is to support the interaction of its members and to promote the access, delivery, and use of scientific information in industry, academia, and government.
  • Home page, http://www.icsti.org/.

    International Council on Archives (ICA).
    A non-profit organization for setting archival standards. ICA is now working with UNESCO and IFLA on guidelines for digitizing content already in the public domain.
  • Home page, http://www.ica.org/.

    International Digital Electronic Access Library (IDEAL).
    An online collection of journals, reference works, and databases for research in the STM fields. The service is not free. The licensing is innovative in allowing article-by-article payment rather than journal-by-journal payment. IDEAL sources participate in CrossRef.
  • Home page, http://www.idealibrary.com/.

    International DOI Foundation (IDF).
    A non-profit organization created in 1998 to administer the evolving DOI standard. Membership is open to any interested party, and tends to consist of professional and learned societies and commercial publishers.
  • Home page, http://www.doi.org/welcome.html.

    International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA).
    A non-profit organization speaking for libraries and librarians around the world. Founded in 1927. Among its projects is a set of guidelines on the digitization of library and archival material in the public domain (with ICA and UNESCO).
  • Home page, http://www.ifla.org/.

    International Journal on Digital Libraries.
    A scholarly journal that often publishes articles on FOS-related topics.
  • Home page, http://link.springer.de/link/service/journals/00799/.

    International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP).
    Oxford-based organization dedicated to improving the flow of scientific information, especially into nations with less developed systems for publishing and distributing information. Some projects concern print literature, some digital literature. Among its projects African Journals Online and PERI. It has produced an excellent Reader on Electronic Journal Publishing at http://www.inasp.org.uk/.
  • Home page, http://www.inasp.org.uk/psi/bmp/internet.html.

    International Publishers Association (IPA).
    A consortium of national publishers associations founded in 1896. It is particularly active in preserving the freedom to write, publish, and read. One of the initial sponsors of the DOI initiative.
  • Home page, http://www.ipa-uie.org/.

    International Research on Permanent Authentic Records in Electronic Systems (InterPARES).
    An international research project on the long-term preservation of electronic information. Based at the University of British Columbia.
  • Home page, http://www.interpares.org/.

    International Scholarly Communications Alliance (ISCA).
    An alliance of eight major research library organizations from eight nations, launched February 6, 2002. ISCA members represent over 600 research libraries around the world, with budgets over $5 billion (US), and serving more than 11 million faculty and students. ICAS will act on behalf of all its members to promote "necessary, practical and viable...initiatives to transform the scholarly communication process". Its press release gives two examples. One is SPARC and the other is self-archiving using OAI-compliant institutional archives.
  • ISCA has no home page yet. Here is the press release announcing its launch, http://www.topica.com/lists/fos-forum/read/message.html?mid=903374369&sort=d&start=78.

    Interoperability.
    The cooperation, interaction, or sharing among different archives, publishers, text formats, or information sectors (e.g. university libraries and commercial journals) permitted by the use of common metadata standards, e.g. for storage, access, cataloging, or communication. One form of interoperability is reference linking, or the linking of citations to sources, for example by CrossRef. Another form is the support of different archives for common data services such as searching, for example in the Open Archives Initiative.

    Interoperability Metadata Standard for Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD-MS).
    A proposed metadata standard from the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations. The name authority linking mechanism in this standard is being developed by OCLC.
  • Home page, http://www.ndltd.org/standards/metadata/current.html.

    Interoperability of Data in E-Commerce (INDECS).
    A non-profit organization creating metadata standards for ecommerce. Not relevant to FOS except that it is adopting the DOI standard and may, therefore, help to establish it in both the commercial and academic domains.
  • Home page, http://www.indecs.org.

    InterPARES. See International Research on Permanent Authentic Records in Electronic Systems.

    Investigating Portals for Information Resources And Learning (INSPIRAL).
    A research project to identify and analyze the issues in linking digital libraries to virtual learning environments. JISC will use the results to set priorities for future funding in this area. Funded by JISC for six months (May-October, 2001), and carried out by the the University of Strathclyde's Centre for Digital Library Research and Centre for Educational Systems.
  • Home page, http://inspiral.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/.

    Invisible Internet.
    Another term for the deep internet.

    IOP. See Institute of Physics.

    IPA. See International Publishers Association.

    IPC. See Intellectual Property Conservancy.

    ISC. See Institutional Service Component.

    ISCA. See International Scholarly Communications Alliance.

    IST. See Information Society Technologies Programme.

    ITPapers.
    An online archive of white papers in many areas of information technology. Users must register, but registration is free of charge.
  • Home page, http://itpapers.com/.

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    JAKE. See Jointly Administered Knowledge Environment.

    JERRI. See Joint Electronic Records Repository Initiative.

    JISC. See Joint Information Systems Committee.

    Joint Electronic Records Repository Initiative (JERRI).
    A research project to identify standards, formats, and methods for the archiving of public records and electronic texts. Sponsored by several Ohio state agencies. Among its projects (with OCLC, GPO, and others) is the Web Document Digital Archive .
  • Home page, http://www.state.oh.us/das/dcs/opp/jointrepository.htm.

    Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC).
    An omnipresent association of academic managers, technologists, and scholars promoting digital information and technology in higher education in the UK. Among its programs are CEDARS, AHDS, DNER, EBONI, eLib, eprints, the HEDS, the Open Citation Project, the Open Journal Project, the SuperJournal Project, and UKOLN.
  • Home page, http://www.jisc.ac.uk/.
  • Full list of JISC projects, http://www.jisc.ac.uk/dner/development/projects/projects_alphabetical.html

    Jointly Administered Knowledge Environment (JAKE).
    Open source software to organize, search, and provide reference linking for online full-text journals from cooperating sources. Some of the journals are accessible without charge, and some are not. From the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library of the Yale University School of Medicine.
  • Home page, http://jake-db.org/.
  • JAKE FAQ, http://www.jake-db.org/docs/faq.php.
  • An alternative JAKE interface from Simon Fraser University, http://mercury.lib.sfu.ca/~tholbroo/sfujake-mason/search.html.

    Journal of Digital Information.
    Scholarly journal occasionally covering FOS issues.
  • Home page, http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk/.

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    K

    Kepler.
    Software to create an empty OAI-compliant archive ready for the user to fill. Similar to the eprints software, but while eprints is intended for institution-wide archives, Kepler is designed for individual archivelets. Developed by the Digital Library Group at Old Dominion University.
  • Home page, http://kepler.cs.odu.edu/.

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    L

    Learned Publishing.
    A scholarly journal occasionally covering FOS issues. Published the the ALPSP.
  • Home page, http://www.alpsp.org/journal.htm.

    Learning Objects Network.
    A DOI registration agency. This means that it can assign DOI prefixes to publishers, register DOIs, and facilitate the creation and revision of metadata associated with a DOI.
  • Home page, http://www.learningobjectsnetwork.com/.

    Library of Congress.
    The national library of the United States. In addition to putting an extraordinary amount of information online free of charge, it has been a leader in the digital library movement. Among its projects the Digital Libraries Initiative and the National Digital Library Program.
  • Home page, http://www.loc.gov/.

    (Refereed) Literature Liberation Movement.
    Stevan Harnad's term for what I call the Free Online Scholarship Movement, or the movement covered by this guide. Harnad emphasizes that the movement applies only to "give-away" literature, i.e. the literature that authors voluntarily disseminate without payment, and especially to the refereed or peer-reviewed portion of the give-away literature. See Harnad's essay, http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/newscientist.htm.

    LOC. See Library of Congress.

    Localized linking.
    Links on a web page that take users to the appropriate copies of the resources listed on the page, e.g. giving preference to copies stored locally at the user's institution or for which the user's institution has bought licenses. Also called local, contextual, or context-sensitive linking. For one technology to provide localized linking, see OpenURL.

    LOCKSS. See Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe.

    Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe (LOCKSS).
    A self-correcting peer-to-peer network of caches designed to make multiple identical back-ups of the content in a cache. When the master cache receives new content, the other nodes are updated automatically. When a node is damaged or deleted, it is automatically repaired. This can assure libraries long-term access to their ejournals, even if a publisher's site goes down or the publisher goes out of business. When the software is polished, it will be released as open source. LOCKSS was developed at Stanford University with support from NSF, Sun Microsystems, and the Mellon Foundation.
  • Home page, http://lockss.stanford.edu/

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    M

    MAGiC. See Managing Access to Grey Literature Collections.

    Managing Access to Grey Literature Collections (MAGiC).
    An initiative to create free online access to distributed collections of grey literature, especially UK engineering reports. Sponsored by the Research Support Libraries Program and the British Library.
  • Home page, http://www.magic.ac.uk/.

    Medline.
    A free online database of bibliographic citations to over 11 million articles from over 4500 biomedical journals and magazines starting in 1966. It also contains some article abstracts. From the National Library of Medicine. Medline is now a subset of PubMed.
  • Home page, http://www.nlm.nih.gov/databases/databases_medline.html.
  • Search Medline for free through PubMed, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi.
  • Search Medline for free through InfoTrieve, http://www4.infotrieve.com/home.asp.

    Memory of the World Programme.
    An international effort to preserve the digitized documents of the cultures of the world. One of its projects is the Directory of Digitized Collections. Sponsored by UNESCO.
  • Home page, http://www.unesco.org/webworld/mdm/index_2.html.

    Metadata.
    Data about a data file. For example, if an online journal article is the primary data file, then its metadata could include the author, title, publisher, date, and URL. Different metadata standards put different elements in this list and sometimes identify the same element by different names. For example, for some purposes the language, copyright owner, classification number, or "family safety" rating, would be relevant, while for others they would not. Metadata can be used to help locate documents, catalogue them, preserve them, navigate among them, open or block access to them for certain users, and link citations to sources. Because the metadata file is almost always smaller than the corresponding data file, it can greatly speed up processing where it can stand in the place of the data file, e.g. for searching or cataloging. In the industry jargon, information sources "declare" or "expose" metadata, while information services like search engines "harvest" the metadata. The list of elements in a metadata file is a "vocabulary" and the formal definition of a vocabulary is a "schema".
  • For a large variety of ways in which different institutions are using metadata, see MICI.

    Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS).
    A standard for encoding descriptive, administrative, and structural metadata for objects within a digital library. A project of the DLF.
  • Home page, http://www.loc.gov/standards/mets/.

    Metadata Engine Project (METAe).
    An international project to develop software for creating metadata automatically for printed texts as they undergo digitization. It expects to have a prototype in 2002. Funded by CORDIS through its FP5, IST, and Digicult programs. Among its participating organizations is HEDS.
  • Home page, http://meta-e.uibk.ac.at/.

    Metadata Information Clearinghouse Interactive (MICI).
    A clearinghouse for metadata projects, standards, and initiatives. MICI encourages representatives of new metadata projects to enter the MICI online database and post information about their activity for others to see, and to post questions or comments about other projects. Sponsored by AAP, CDI, and the publisher John Wiley and Sons, Inc.
  • Home page, http://www.metadatainformation.org/.

    METAe. See Metadata Engine Project.

    METS. See Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard.

    MICI. See Metadata Information Clearinghouse Interactive.

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    N

    NAP. See National Academy Press.

    NASA. See National Aeronautics and Space Administration

    National Academy Press (NAP).
    The publishing arm of the national academies, i.e. National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, Institute of Medicine, and National Research Council. It publishes all its books digitally on the web, free of charge, and reports that the online copies stimulate hardcopy sales. Its home-grown ebook format is an open-source protocol called the Open Book Interface.
  • Home page, http://books.nap.edu/.

    National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
    The U.S. agency responsible for aeronautic research and space exploration. Among its projects are the Astrophysics Data System the Digital Libraries Initiative, and the Networked Computer Science Technical Reference Library.
  • Home page, http://www.nasa.gov/.

    National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI).
    A division of the National Library of Medicine which produces free online research databases, creates tools for analyzing genome data, and sponsors research in computational biology. Among its projects is PubMed.
  • Home page, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/.

    National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA).
    One of the five national U.S. supercomputer centers funded by NSF. Among its projects is the original Dublin Core metadata standard, and Mosaic, the first graphical web browser.
  • Home page, http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/.

    National Digital Library Program (NDLP).
    A program of the Library of Congress (LOC) with many corporate co-sponsors. Over time the LOC will digitize its distinctive holdings in American history, including rare books, documents, maps, drawings, photographs, films, and sound recordings. The results are put online free of charge. The American Memory collection is part of the program, and already (May 2001) has over seven million digital items online. The NDLP works with the members of DLF and other U.S. libraries, and uses some technology from CNRI.
  • Home page, http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/dli2/html/lcndlp.html.
  • Corporate co-sponsors of the NDLP, http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/sponsors.html.
  • FAQ for American Memory and the NDLP, http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/helpdesk/amfaq.html.
  • Guide to the Library of Congress' digital collections, http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/collections/finder.html.

    National Electronic Article Repository (NEAR).
    A plan proposed by David Shulenberger, provost of the University of Kansas. Under the plan, authors would transfer to journals only the right of first journal publication. Some time after print publication, say, 90 days after, the author would transfer all or most of the remaining rights (the proposal allows many variations) to NEAR, along with an electronic copy of the article. NEAR would then put the article into the public domain and host it for all the world to access. Universities would require their employees to deposit their works in NEAR, funding agencies would do the same with their grant recipients. (Shulenberger persuaded the University of Kansas Board of Regents to do adopt such a policy, pending the creation of NEAR.) NEAR would be funded by universities paying "page charges" per article included by their employees, by taxpayers, or by small user access charges, or by some combination of these.
  • NEAR was never realized, so there is no NEAR home page. But here is the article in which Shulenberger proposed it, http://www.arl.org/newsltr/202/shulenburger.html. (February 1999 article based on October 1998 presentation at the 133rd ARL Membership Meeting held in October 1998 in Washington, D.C.)

    National Information Standards Organization (NISO).
    Developer of U.S. national standards for information services. It has developed an official standard for DOI's and is working on an official standard for OpenURLs.
  • Home page, http://www.niso.org/

    National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage (NINCH).
    A coalition of non-profit organizations in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Sponsored by the ACLS, CNI, and the Getty Trust.
  • Home page, http://www.ninch.org/.

    National Library of Medicine (NLM).
    The world's largest biomedical library, hub of a network of regional medical libraries in the U.S., foundation for grants, and sponsor of free online medical databases. Among its projects are the Digital Libraries Initiative, Medline, the National Center for Biotechnology Information, and PubMed. A division of the National Institutes of Health, which is part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
  • Home page, http://www.nlm.nih.gov/.
  • NLM FAQ, http://www.nlm.nih.gov/services/faq.html.

    National Science Digital Library (NSDL).
    Full title:  National Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology Education Digital Library. A free online archive of information, scholarship, and interactive teaching materials in all fields of the sciences, designed to support education at all levels. Now under construction and to debut in the Fall of 2002. The web site says the NSDL "is likely to be the largest and most heterogeneous digital library yet built." Funded by the NSF.
  • Home page, http://nsdl.nsf.gov/indexx.html.

    National Science Foundation (NSF).
    An independent agency of the U.S. federal government charged to promote the progress of science. Among its programs are the the arXiv preprint archive, the Digital Libraries Initiative, eprints, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, the National Science Digital Library, the Open Citation Project, the Open Language Archives Community, and Perseus.
  • Home page, http://www.nsf.gov/.

    National Technical Information Service (NTIS).
    A division of the U.S. Department of Commerce supporting online databases of government scientific, technological, engineering, and related business information. Most of this information is not available free of charge. Among its projects is the Gov.Research Center.
  • Home page, http://www.ntis.gov/.

    Nature Discussion.
    A discussion of FOS issues sponsored by the journal, Nature. Inspired by an article by Declan Butler and Philip Campbell, "Future E-Access to the Primary Literature," in the April 5, 2001, issue.
  • Home page, http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/.
  • Original Butler and Campbell article, http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/introduction.html.

    NCBI. See National Center for Biotechnology Information.

    NCSA. See National Center for Supercomputing Applications.

    NCSTRL. See Networked Computer Science Technical Reference Library.

    NDLP. See National Digital Library Program.

    NDLTD. See Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations.

    NEAR. See National Electronic Article Repository.

    NEDLIB. See Networked European Deposit Library.

    NESSTAR. See Networked Social Science Tools and Resources.

    NetFirst.
    A comprehensive directory of internet resources selected for quality and permanence. For each included site, NetFirst has written an abstract and an evaluation. A project from OCLC.
  • Home page, http://www.oclc.org/oclc/netfirst/.

    netLibrary.
    A web-based seller and lending library of ebooks. If an institutional library buys some ebooks from netLibrary, then netLibrary will host and lend them over the web. netLibrary will insure that only eligible users borrow them, that only one borrower at a time has a given book, and that a borrower's access stops when the borrowing period expires. Borrowers may read the books online or download them. netLibrary also handles the check out and return process, prevents copying and printing more than short excerpts, supports searching across collections and within individual books, and provides usage data to a book's owner. This frees institutions to enlarge their holdings of ebooks without implementing the underlying technologies at their own sites. With cooperating publishers, netLibrary will also convert pbooks to ebooks. It now (August 2001) has more than 40,000 academic titles ready to lend. The service is not free for institutional libraries, who buy ebooks from netLibrary, but it is free for borrowers whose institutions have purchased netLibrary ebooks.
  • Home page, http://www.netlibrary.com/.
  • netLibrary FAQ, http://www.netlibrary.com/about_us/academic/faq.asp.

    Network of Excellence on Digital Libraries (DELOS).
    An international consortium of organizations that conduct research into digital libraries. A project of IST (hence CORDIS), coordinated by ERCIM.
  • Home page, http://www.ercim.org/delos/.

    Networked Computer Science Technical Reference Library (NCSTRL).
    A searchable and browsable international archive of online reports in computer science. Access is free of charge. NCSTRL is becoming OAI-compliant. A joint project of NASA and three Virginia universities.
  • Home page, http://www.ncstrl.org.

    Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD).
    A repository of digital theses and dissertations, all of which are accessible without charge. Some of the dissertations are also part of OCLC's WorldCat database. NDLTD uses some of the open source tools in ALCME (from OCLC), and the Union Catalog software, Virtua (donated by VTLS Inc.). From Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.
  • Home page, http://www.ndltd.org.
  • For the theses themselves, http://www.theses.org/.

    Networked European Deposit Library (NEDLIB).
    A completed project (1998-2000) of the European national libraries to create an infrastructure for the preservation and access of electronic publications. The project resulted in reports, guidelines, standards, and proof-of-concept demonstrations. Uses OAIS. Oddly, some of its reports, though free, are available only in hardcopy, not online.
  • Home page, http://www.kb.nl/coop/nedlib/.

    Networked Social Science Tools and Resources (NESSTAR).
    An online front end to a system of distributed archives of social science data, accompanied by software tools for locating, searching, browsing, downloading, tabulating, analyzing, publishing, storing, and serving similar data. All NESSTAR tools and services are free of charge, although when users access for-pay sources, NESSTAR tools handle access rights and payment. Funded by IST.
  • Home page, http://www.nesstar.com/ (formerly nesstar.org).

    NewJour.
    A large, free web directory of electronic journals. Users may browse an alphabetical list, a reverse-chronological list of recent additions, or search for journals by keyword. NewJour also issues an email newsletter of new additions. Edited by Ann Shumelda Okerson and James J. O'Donnell.
  • Home page, http://gort.ucsd.edu/newjour/.

    NINCH. See National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage.

    NISO. See National Information Standards Organization.

    NLM. See National Library of Medicine.

    Noesis.
    A searchable and browseable index of free online scholarship in philosophy. Edited by Tony Beavers and Peter Suber. From Noetic Labs.
  • Home page, http://noesis.evansville.edu/bin/index.cgi

    Noetic Laboratories.
    A company doing research in artificial intelligence, search technology, peer-to-peer information sharing, and emergent quality control. Among its projects are Argos, Hippias, and Noesis, all available online free of charge. Founded by Tony Beavers and Peter Suber.
  • Home page, http://noetic-labs.com.

    NSDL. See National Science Digital Library.

    NSF. See National Science Foundation.

    NTIS. See National Technical Information Service.

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    O

    OAF. See Open Archives Forum.

    OAI. See Open Archives Initiative.

    OAIS. See Open Archival Information System.

    OASIS. See Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards.

    OCLC. See Online Computer Library Center.

    OeBF. See Open eBook Forum.

    OJP. See Open Journal Project.

    OKI. See Open Knowledge Initiative.

    OLAC. See Open Language Archives Community.

    Online Computer Library Center (OCLC).
    A non-profit organization serving its 36,000+ member libraries in 75+ countries. Its goals are to improve access to information and reduce costs to libraries. Among its projects are ALCME, the Dublin Core metadata standard, the ETD-MS metadata standard, FirstSearch, NetFirst, and the Web Document Digital Archive.
  • Home page, http://www.oclc.org/home/

    Online Public Access Catalogue (OPAC).
    An electronic card catalogue of a library's holdings available online free of charge.

    OPAC. See Online Public Access Catalogue.

    OpCit. See Open Citation Project.

    Open Access.
    A term for barrier-free online access —in the case of FOS, to scholarly literature. This is the term favored by the Budapest Open Access Initiative, for example. Here is the BOAI's full definition of the term:  "There are many degrees and kinds of wider and easier access to this literature. By 'open access' to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited." Open access eliminates two kinds of access barriers: (1) price barriers and (2) permission barriers associated with restrictive use of copyright, licensing terms, or DRM.

    Open-Access Archive.
    An archive offering open access to its contents.

    Open-Access Journal.
    A journal offering open access to its contents.

    Open Archival Information System (OAIS).
    A standard for the functions, data, and management essential for long-term preservation of digital objects. The system stands between producers and consumers of data, translating the producer's data into a form suitable for long-term archiving and again into a form suitable for dissemination and consumer use. Developed by the Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS) for data generated by the U.S. space program, but designed to be of general application. Used in such FOS-related programs as CEDARS, NEDLIB, and WDDA.
  • There seems to be no OAIS home-page, but here is a draft of the standard, http://www.ccsds.org/rpa117/rpa117.html

    Open Archives Forum (OAF).
    An international organization to stimulate and support European implementations of the Open Archives Initiative and its metadata harvesting protocol. Sponsored by the UK's UKOLN, Italy's Istituto di Elaborazione della Informazione, and Germany's Rechenzentrum.
  • Home page, http://edoc.hu-berlin.de/oaf/.

    Open Archives Initiative (OAI).
    A protocol for collecting metadata about data files residing in separate archives. The idea behind OAI is to separate data providers (e.g. preprint and postprint archives) from data services (e.g. search engines). If the data providers comply with certain standards, then third parties can create data services to handle their data. In practice this means that all the OAI-compliant archives that register in a central registry can be treated as a single, grand virtual archive for the purpose of searching. The OAI protocol requires support of the Unqualified Dublin Core metadata standard, but permits and even encourages more expressive metadata formats. The standards are "open" in the sense that they permit interoperability across a variety of archive types, not in the sense that they require data providers to put their content into the public domain or provide access to it without charge. The OAI standards grew out of the Sante Fe Convention and the Universal Preprint Service. Sponsored by DLF and CNI.
  • Home page, http://www.openarchives.org/.
  • OAI FAQ, http://www.openarchives.org/documents/FAQ.html.
  • List of registered OAI-compliant archives, http://www.openarchives.org/Register/BrowseSites.pl

    Open Book Interface.
    The web-based ebook format developed by the National Academy Press. The software to convert book files to this format will eventually be released as open source.
  • Home page, http://www.nap.edu/info/site.html

    Open Citation Project (OpCit).
    A research and development project funded by NSF and JISC and carried out at Southampton University, Cornell University, and the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Its mission is to develop reference linking software to link citations to sources for all the papers in the arXiv preprint archive, and make the software general-purpose for other archives, especially OAI-compliant archives. (The project is funded for three years, beginning in October 1999.) One of its parts is eprints. Another is Cite-Base. Based on the now completed Open Journal Project.
  • Home page, http://opcit.eprints.org/.

    Open Content.
    A web site to "facilitate the prolific creation of freely available, high-quality, well-maintained Content". The front page merely links to some FOS initiatives and FOS news. (It hasn't been updated in some time.) But other pages at the site propose an "open content license" and an "open publication license", which are to replace copyright and standard licenses and preserve the right to copy, distribute, and modify the content.
  • Home page, http://www.opencontent.org/.

    Open eBook Forum.
    An international non-profit trade and standards organization for the ebook industry. Its purpose is to bring the major stakeholders together (authors, publishers, platform manufacturers, readers) and develop standards that serve them all. It is "open" in the sense that it encourages interoperability of ebook systems.
  • Home page, http://www.openebook.org/.

    Open Journal Project (OJP).
    An early project in reference linking. The OJP planned to link online journals to one another (citations to sources) and to indexing services. Funded by JISC as part of eLib. The project was only funded from May 1995 until May 1998 and is now laid down, though its work has continued in the Open Citation Project, which also funded by JISC.
  • Home page, http://journals.ecs.soton.ac.uk/.

    Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI).
    A project to build a scalable, open source education management system (an architecture and components). Carried out primarily by MIT and Stanford, with funding from the Mellon Foundation.
  • Home page, http://web.mit.edu/oki/.

    Open Language Archives Community (OLAC).
    An international organization of institutions and individuals creating a free online archive of resources on language and linguistics. OLAC is OAI-compliant. Funded by NSF. To be launched in January 2002.
  • Home page, http://www.language-archives.org/.

    Open Links.
    A reference linking system from Ovid. The system is "open" in the sense that it permits institutions to link from Ovid ejournals to a large and presumably growing set of other ejournals to which the institution may subscribe. OpenLinks fully supports the OpenURL standard.
  • Home page, http://admin.ovid.com/openlinks/.

    OpenResolver.
    A demonstration resolver for OpenURLs, from UKOLN.
  • Home page, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/openurl/.

    Open Society Institute (OSI).
    A philanthropic organization created by George Soros in 1993 to develop and maintain open societies around the world. Among its projects are the Budapest Open Access Initiative, the Digital Promise Project, eIFL Direct, and HINARI. (Full disclosure:  I'm a consultant to OSI on FOS issues.)
  • Home page, http://www.soros.org/osi.html.

    Open Source Research Community.
    An online registry of scholars interested in the open source and free software movements, and a free online archive of their scholarship. Hosted by MIT.
  • Home page, http://opensource.mit.edu/.

    OpenURL.
    A compound URL containing a network address and some metadata about a data file. The purpose is to provide services beyond ordinary linking, such as the following. (1) Permanence or persistence, so that the URL remains valid even if the destination file moves to a new location. (2) Multiple resolution, so that clicking on the link brings up a menu of options, not just the destination file. Among the menu options might be different versions of the destination file, metadata about it, forums for discussing it, and credit-card forms for buying electronic access or a printed copy. (3) Context-sensitivity, so that the menu options are determined by the user's identity, location, or institution. This kind of contextual linking is designed to solve the appropriate copy problem. The URL and its associated metadata in the OpenURL are read by a "resolver", software residing elsewhere on the network. The resolver stores information on users and institutional resources and is therefore sometimes called the Institutional Service Component (ISC). It determines whether the user has access rights to the data file coded in the OpenURL and, if so, downloads the file to the user's browser. The metadata in the OpenURL could include authentication information or passwords needed for the user to gain access to the file. OpenURLs are compatible with DOIs. The OpenURL syntax is being standardized by NISO.
  • The standard, http://www.sfxit.com/openurl/openurl.html.
  • There are currently two OpenURL resolvers:  a full-strength resolver, SFX from Ex Libris, and a demonstrator, OpenResolver from UKOLN. (Experimenting with the OpenResolver demo may make all this much clearer.)

    Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS).
    A non-profit consortium of corporations, organizations, and individuals dedicated to the creation of interoperability standards based on XML. All OASIS discussions are open to the public.
  • Home page, http://www.oasis-open.org/.

    OSI. See Open Society Institute.

    Overlay Journal.
    An open-access journal that takes submissions from the preprints deposited at an archive (perhaps at the author's initiative), and subjects them to peer review. If approved (perhaps after revision), the postprints are also deposited in an archive with some indication that they have been approved. One such indication would be a new citation that included the name of the journal. Another could be a link from the journal's online table of contents. A third could be new metadata associated with the file. An overlay journal might be associated with just one archive or with many. Because an overlay journal doesn't have its own apparatus for disseminating accepted papers, but uses the pre-existing system of interoperable archives, it is a minimalist journal that only performs peer review. It is important to FOS as an especially low-investment, easily-launched form of open-access journal.

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    P

    PADI. See Preserving Access to Digital Information.

    pbook.
    A printed book, by analogy to ebook.

    PDF. See Portable Document Format.

    Peer review.
    Assessment of a work of scholarship by other scholars in the field. An essential method of quality control used by most scholarly journals and academic book publishers. FOS is compatible with peer review and does not make it any less desirable or more difficult. In fact, there are exciting new possibilities for conducting peer review in an interactive electronic environment. However, some forms of FOS, such as preprint archives, are important precisely because they include papers which have not yet been peer reviewed.

    PeP. See Perspectives in Electronic Publishing.

    PERI. See Programme for the Enhancement of Research Information.

    Permission Crisis.
    My term for the result of extensive limitations on the use of ejournals imposed even on paying customers by licensing agreements and DRM. By analogy to the pricing crisis.
  • Term first introduced in this article, http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/writing/acrl.htm

    Perseus Digital Library.
    An OAI-compliant collection of digital texts from Ancient Greece and Rome, the English Renaissance, and other periods. Funded by the Digital Libraries Initiative, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, the Modern Language Association, and Tufts University.
  • Home page, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/.

    Perspectives in Electronic Publishing (PeP).
    Both a journal which often publishes articles relevant to FOS, and a model for a new kind of electronic journal. It publishes new papers and links to relevant papers already published online. When it links to papers elsewhere, at the user's discretion it can present them unaltered or enhanced with additional links. Readers may browse by sub-topic or search the abstracts and extracts of included articles. Concecived and edited by Steve Hitchcock.
  • Home page, http://aims.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pep.nsf.

    PhilSci Archive.
    An OAI-compliant preprint archive for the philosophy of science.
  • Home page, http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/.

    PILA. See Publishers International Linking Association.

    pjournal.
    A printed journal, by analogy to ejournal.

    PKP. See Public Knowledge Project.

    PLoS. See Public Library of Science.

    Portable Document Format (PDF).
    A leading format for the distribution of digital documents. Documents in nearly any format can be converted to PDF using Adobe Acrobat software, and can be read on nearly any hardware platform with Adobe Acrobat Reader. Both programs are free of charge. From Adobe Systems Inc.
  • Home page, http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/adobepdf.html.

    Postprint.
    An edition of a text produced after it has appeared in print and therefore usually after it has been peer reviewed and revised for the editorial process. See eprint and preprint.

    Preprint.
    An edition of a text before it has been peer reviewed or published by a journal. See eprint and postprint.
  • The Iowa State University e-Library has a useful list of collections of free online preprints at http://www.lib.iastate.edu/services/ref/preprint.html.

    Preserving Access to Digital Information (PADI).
    A program of the National Library of Australia to identify, develop, and promote guidelines for the preservation of digital information. It maintains a superb collection of links to relevant groups, projects, journals, recommendations, and standards in this area.
  • Home page, http://www.nla.gov.au/padi/.

    Professional and Scholarly Publishing (PSP).
    The term used by the AAP for the division of publishing industry devoted to academic writing and research, whether in print or electronic.

    Programme for the Enhancement of Research Information (PERI).
    A program to strengthen scholarly journals, publishing, and research in developing countries. The first phase of the program provides free or affordable online access to a large number of scholarly journals for universities and research centers in sub-Saharan Africa. Launched in January 2001. A program of INASP.
  • Home page, http://www.inasp.org.uk/peri/index.html.

    Project Gutenberg.
    A web site containing large and growing number of full-text books in the public domain. All are accessible without charge. Users may browse or search by author or title. Founded by Michael Hart in 1971, it is probably the oldest online free text archive.
  • Home page, http://promo.net/pg/.
  • If you want the interface options of an ebook reader for reading these HTML files, see Paul Mennega's Project Gutenberg Reader, http://www.pgreader.com/. The reader is free.

    Project InfoMed.
    A project to provide free online access to medical journals and medical information primarily within Cuba. Among its resources is the U.S. National Library of Medicine. Funded by the Cuban government, the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), the United Nations Development program, and the Caribbean and Latin American Medical Science Information Center (Bireme). Hardware support for Project InfoMed is hampered by the U.S. embargo against Cuba.
  • Home page, http://www.cubasolidarity.net/infomed.html.
  • USA-Cuba InfoMed home page, http://www.cubasolidarity.net/ininfome.html.

    PSP. See Professional Scholarly Publishing.

    Psycoloquy.
    One of the first (1989) free, online-only, peer-reviewed journals. Sponsored by the American Psychological Association.
  • Home page, http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/psycoloquy/.

    Public Knowledge.
    A non-profit advocacy group working to preserve a "vibrant intellectual commons". It is especially concerned to make copyright law serve art, culture, democracy, and science.
  • Home page, http://www.publicknowledge.org/.

    Public Knowledge Project (PKP).
    A research project into the ways into new technologies can improve the value of scholarship both for professional researchers and for the public. Among other things, it tries to integrate emerging standards for access and searching (OAI) with standards for preservation (InterPARES). From the University of British Columbia.
  • Home page, http://www.pkp.ubc.ca/about/what.html.

    Public Library of Science (PLoS).
    A bold FOS initiative that started with a March 23, 2001, letter to the editor of Science Magazine signed by Richard Roberts, Harold Varmus, and eight others. The gist of the letter was to call on biomedical journals to put their contents online, free of charge, in public archives, within six months of print publication. The call has since been widened to all scientific and scholarly journals. Roberts, Varmus, et al. also called on scientists to sign a pledge not to "publish in, edit or review for, or personally subscribe to" journals that do not heed the call by September 1, 2001. The web list of signers now (August 2001) includes more than 26,000 scientists from 170 countries.
  • Home page, http://www.publiclibraryofscience.org/.

    Publishers International Linking Association (PILA).
    The non-profit organization which operates CrossRef. PILA does not have a home-page, but the members of its board are listed on the web at http://www.crossref.org/board.htm. Board members represent non-profit organizations like the American Association for the Advancement of Science and commercial publishers like Elsevier and Springer-Verlag.

    PubMed.
    A free online database of bibliographic citations and abstracts of medical research articles. It subsumes Medline and goes beyond it in topics, date range, and sources. It also links to full-text articles from participating publishers (which are free for some publishers and priced for others). Registered users have access to Cubby, a stored search and current awareness service. (Registration is free.) From the National Library of Medicine and NCBI. Since February 2000, PubMed has been supplemented by PubMed Central (formerly E-Biomed), which provides free online access to any full-text medical journal articles that publishers (as opposed to authors) are willing to deposit with the service.
  • PubMed home-page, http://www4.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/PubMed/.
  • PubMed Central home-page, http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/.
  • PubMed FAQ, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query/static/faq.html.
  • Another NCBI service called LinkOut allows a PubMed user to link from a PubMed citation to a full-text article, if the user's institution has licensed the full-text article. LinkOut home page, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/linkout/

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    R

    RD. See Resource Discovery.

    RDF. See Resource Description Framework.

    RDN. See Resource Discovery Network.

    Reference Linking.
    Hyperlinks between bibliographic or footnote citations and full-text sources. Sometimes called citation linking. Systems of reference linking face the appropriate copy problem. For major initiatives to automate reference linking across publishers, see CrossRef and the OpCit.

    Renardus.
    A project to improve access to existing academic content on the internet. It provides a unified interface and common search engine for distributed content portals maintained by subject-matter experts throughout Europe. Renardus is funded by the IST Programme.
  • Home page, http://www.renardus.org/index.html

    RePEc. See Research Papers in Economics.

    Research Libraries Group (RLG).
    A non-profit organization of universities, libraries, and professional associations with notable research collections. Its mission is to improve access to information for research and learning. Among its projects are DigiNews and (with OCLC) the Digital Preservation Commons
  • Home page, http://www.rlg.org/toc.html.

    Research Papers in Economics (RePEc).
    The largest decentralized digital library in the world, RePEc is a collection of over 200 archives of research papers, journal articles, and software in economics, all parts of which are available online free of charge. An earlier incarnation, Working Papers in Economics (WoPEc), received funding from JISC as part of its eLib program.
  • Home page, http://www.repec.org/.

    ResearchIndex.
    A free online library of scientific literature. In addition to the texts, it provides open source software for searching and interlinking them, providing citation statistics, current awareness, and other services. The source code is available without charge for non-commercial purposes. Sponsored by the NEC Research Institute. Formerly called CiteSeer.
  • Home page, http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/cs.

    Resource Description Framework (RDF).
    An abstract syntax or architecture for metadata. It provides a structure for describing the properties of web objects and the values of those properties. The idea is to give the metadata standards for different applications (e.g. searching, cataloging, content rating, rights management, digital signatures) a common syntactic foundation. The common syntactic foundation facilitates the machine reading and exchange of metadata, and therefore facilitates the interoperability of web-based applications that exchange metadata. RDF also allows different industries with different purposes to introduce metadata labels for the properties that matter to them, and to make these labels unambiguous by tying them to their own online vocabularies. In this way RDF supports multiple, independent metadata semantic vocabularies to coexist in a common syntax, and allows different industries to use the same names for different properties without confusion. It also allows novel applications to participate in the universal metadata syntax as soon as they know what they want to describe and how they want to describe it; they needn't go to the trouble of working out a syntax or involving standards committees. For all these reasons, RDF gives applications unprecedented power to make use of metadata for searching, cataloging, organizing, or any other purpose. RDF is usually expressed in XML, though it is language-independent. An initiative of the W3C. Originally called the Warwick Framework.
  • UKOLN page on RDF, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/resources/rdf/.
  • W3C page on RDF, http://www.w3.org/RDF/.

    Resource Discovery (RD).
    The process of finding literature and other resources on a given topic. A library card catalog is a paper-based RD system. Making faster and more efficient RD systems is one of the primary motivations behind the many metadata standards.

    Resource Discovery Network (RDN).
    A network of subject-matter portals or "hubs" for finding and organizing online content, primarily in the UK. Within each hub, the links are selected and annotated by human experts, giving users a measure of quality assurance. RDN supports searches across portals. Sponsored by the DNER (hence JISC).
  • Home page, http://www.rdn.ac.uk/.

    RLG. See Research Libraries Group.

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    S

    Sante Fe Convention.
    The framework for interoperable archives agreed upon at an October 1999 meeting in Sante Fe, New Mexico. The framework has since evolved into what is now called the Open Archives Initiative. Now that the OAI is on its feet, the Sante Fe Convention has been laid down. The original Sante Fe meeting was called by Paul Ginsparg, Rick Luce, and Herbert Van de Sompel.
  • Home page, http://www.openarchives.org/sfc/sfc_entry.htm.

    Scholarly Communication.
    The closest thing we have to a widely used generic term for the publication and dissemination of scholarly research papers —priced and free, refereed and unrefereed, in articles and books, in print and online (even orally delivered at conferences), and so on.

    Scholarly Communication Crisis.
    Sometimes called the serials pricing crisis. The crisis for libraries arising from the fact that scholarly journal prices have risen faster than inflation, and faster than library budgets, for more than 30 years. The problem is aggravated by publisher consolidation (some say monopoly), amendments to copyright law reducing the rights of users, and harsh licensing contracts further reducing the rights of users (see permission crisis). For all these reasons libraries pay much more and get much less than in the past.
  • Good overview of the crisis from Create Change, http://www.arl.org/create/librarians/issues/quick.html.
  • Crisis FAQ from Create Change, http://www.arl.org/create/librarians/faq/scomm.html.
  • Good overview of the crisis from CURL, http://www.lib.ed.ac.uk/lib/news/curldoc.html.
  • Good statement from the North Carolina State University Libraries on what faculty can do to alleviate the crisis, http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/scc/scholardo.html.

    Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC).
    A non-profit membership organization of universities and libraries with the overall mission of making scholarly journals affordable, primarily in the STM fields. SPARC improves competition in the journal marketplace by identifying niches where competition is most needed, and reducing risks for publishers by assuring a critical number of subscriptions. It also helps journals reduce costs by moving to the internet. Among its programs are BioOne, Create Change, Declaring Independence, and eScholarship. A program of ARL, launched in June 1998.
  • Home page, http://www.arl.org/sparc/home/index.asp.

    Scholars Portal.
    A project from ARL to provide a unified interface to a multitude of scholarly resources, including free web sites and databases for which the institution has paid licenses. It would provide a search engine to cover all the participating sites, and give users options for sources unavailable online (such as one-click inter-library loan) or unavailable without cost (such as one-click credit card purchase). Support would include round the clock chat access to live librarians. It has not yet launched.
  • ARL's May 2001 report on the project, http://www.arl.org/access/scholarsportal/.

    sciBASE.
    The archive of scientific research articles from TheScientificWorld.
  • Home page, http://www.thescientificworld.com/.

    SciDev.
    A non-profit free online source of science news and research "relevant to sustainable development and the social and economic needs of developing countries". It's an outgrowth of a web site hosted by Nature since 1999. In its new incarnation it was launched on December 3, 2001, co-sponsored by Nature and Science, in association with the Third World Academy of Sciences.
  • Home page, http://www.scidev.net/.

    SciELO. See Scientific Electronic Library Online.

    ScienceExpress.
    The policy of Science magazine to post accepted papers to the internet within two weeks of acceptance. The print versions may contain some editorial revisions not present in the online versions. The online papers are published in cooperation with HighWire Press. ScienceExpress articles are accessible only to paying subscribers. Compare Advance Online Publication.
  • Home page, http://www.sciencemag.org/feature/express/introduction.shl.

    Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO).
    A free online collection of Brazilian science journals, about one-third in medicine. It adds about 20 new journals every year. Funded by the Sao Paulo Research Foundation in partnership with the Latin American and Caribbean Center on Health Sciences Information (Bireme), which is part of the Pan American Health Organization and World Health Organization (PAHO/WHO). SciELO licenses the database software underlying its archive to other countries for similar national collections (e.g. Chile and Cuba) and to organizations for topical collections. Among its projects is the Virtual Health Library.
  • Home page, http://www.scielo.br/.

    Scirus.
    A search engine for science. It's relevant to FOS because it provides free searching for texts which are not freely available online. In response to their search queries, non-paying users get bibliographic citations and URLs, and sometimes abstracts, while paying subscribers get full-text. From Elsevier, the science publisher, and Fast Search and Transfer (FAST), the Norwegian search engine.
  • Home page, http://www.scirus.com/.

    Scout Report.
    A weekly email newsletter on higher education and research that often contains items of FOS interest. From the Internet Scout Project.
  • Home page
  • The Scout Report people also product software for academic content portals, http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/research/SPT/main.html.

    Self-Archiving.
    The practice of scholars putting their works online at institutional or individual OAI-compliant archives. Authors first put an unrefereed preprint into the archive. Then they submit the article to a peer-reviewed journal (print or electronic). If it is accepted and the author can negotiate the right to self-archive, then he or she puts the refereed and perhaps revised postprint into the archive. If it is accepted but the publisher does not permit self-archiving, then the author puts only the "corrigenda" (the differences between the online preprint and the published version of the article) into the archive. Also called eprint archiving.
  • Stevan Harnad's case for self-archiving, http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm.
  • The eprints Self-Archiving FAQ, http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/selfaq.htm.
  • For the origin of the idea of self-archiving, see the collection of historical emails collected into Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads (ed. Ann Okerson and James O'Donnell, ARL, 1994), http://www.arl.org/scomm/subversive/toc.html.

    September98-Forum.
    Also called the American Scientist or AmSci forum. The oldest and most comprehensive online discussion of FOS issues. Moderated by Stevan Harnad. Inspired by an article by Thomas J. Walker, "Free Internet Access to Traditional Journals," in the Sept-Oct 1998 issue of American Scientist.
  • Home page, http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/subject.html.
  • Walker's original article, http://www.amsci.org/amsci/articles/98articles/walker.html.
  • Harnad's introduction to the discussion, http://cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/amlet.html.

    SFX.
    This acronym does not apparently stand for anything. SFX is a framework for contextual linking, or for solving the appropriate copy problem. If a user clicks on an OpenURL associated with a bibliographic citation, then a menu pops up giving the user choices for access based on the journals, archives, and databases to which the user's institution subscribes. The options are customized for each institution. The institution's access rights are described in an institutional service component (ISC). After the SFX server authenticates the user, it downloads the file to the user's browser. SFX is compatible with DOI citations and CrossRef. Produced by Ex Libris.
  • Home page, http://www.sfxit.com/.
  • Starting in January 2002, SFX was compatible with CrossRef. This means that at sites using both technologies, the reference links provided by CrossRef will take the user's licenses into account as determined by SFX. This solves the appropriate copy problem for reference links.

    SGML Centre.
    Consultants on the application of the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) and related technologies, such as XML. Among its projects is Diffuse.
  • Home page, http://www.sgml.u-net.com/.

    SIIA. See Software and Information Industry Association.

    Sixth Framework Programme.
    A program to conduct research and technological development funded by the European Union. Among its projects is IST. From CORDIS.
  • Home page, http://www.cordis.lu/ist/fp6/fp6consult.htm.

    SLP. Or S/L/P. See Subscription / Site-License / Pay-Per-View.

    Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA).
    Trade association of software and information publishers. It helps its members make the transition from print to electronic publication. It lobbies for its members' interests by lobbying against government subsidies for free online scholarship.
  • Home page, http://www.siia.net/.

    SPARC. See Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition.

    STM.
    A common abbreviation for "scientific, technical, and medical". For example, there are STM archives, STM search engines, conferences on STM publication, and so on.

    STM. See International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers. (Despite its true acronym, and the fact that "STM" already has a related meaning for most people, this organization calls itself "STM".)

    Subscription / Site-License / Pay-Per-View (SLP, or S/L/P).
    Stevan Harnad's acronym for the three kinds of toll which limit access to scholarship. See his definition and discussion at http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#3.1.

    SuperJournal Project.
    A completed research program (1995-1998) into the factors which would make online journals successful for different constituencies such as readers, authors, librarians, and publishers. Funded by JISC as part of eLib.
  • Home page, http://www.superjournal.ac.uk/sj/.

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    T

    TECUP. See Testbed Implementation of the European Copyright User Platform.

    TEI. See Text Encoding Initiative.

    Tempe Principles.
    A set of principles for scholarly publication emerging from a conference in Tempe, Arizona, May 2-4, 2000. The meeting was sponsored by Association of American Universities (AAU), the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), and the Merrill Advanced Studies Center of the University of Kansas. Participants at the meeting, and authors of the principles, include university administrators (chancellors, presidents, provosts), library directors, representatives from university presses, AAU, ARL, and SPARC. The principles are a response to the serials pricing crisis and propose strategies for making scholarly publications affordable, if not free. They urge faculty to take a larger role in the publication process. Other principles endorse peer review, copyright, reader privacy, and long-term preservation.
  • Home page, http://www.arl.org/scomm/tempe.html

    Testbed Implementation of the European Copyright User Platform (TECUP).
    A project (1998-2001) to bring together authors, publishers, libraries to analyze and evaluate different models for the use and distribution of digital scholarly literature.
  • Home page, http://gdz.sub.uni-goettingen.de/tecup/.
  • List of models evaluated by TECUP, http://gdz.sub.uni-goettingen.de/tecup/project.htm.

    Tethering.
    The practice of producing a digital object (text or software) so that it will run on only one piece of hardware. This is usually enforced with some kind of copy-protection software. Tethering prevents purchasers from taking their purchases with them when they upgrade computers or switch platforms.

    Text Encoding Initiative (TEI).
    A standard for digitizing text and tagging it in XML that aspires to be "maximally expressive and minimally obsolescent". Primarily for texts in the humanities and social sciences.
  • Home page, http://www.tei-c.org/.
  • TEI FAQ, http://www.tei-c.org/Faq/index.html.
  • Texts and text archives using the TEI standard, http://www.tei-c.org/Applications/index.html.

    TheScientificWorld.
    An online archive of research articles in many scientific fields. Users may run full-text searches over the collection, and read abstracts of the hits, free of charge, but must pay for access to full-text. Users who register (at no charge) may customize a scientific news service and store up to three searches with its current awareness service, and receive email alerts of new items satisfying the searches. Finally, its i-Publish service invites submissions to a peer-reviewed journal, TheScientificWorld JOURNAL, which leaves copyright in the hands of the author and pays royalties on major review articles.
  • Home page, http://www.thescientificworld.com/.

    Timeline of the FOS Movement.
    Chronology of the major events in the movement. By Peter Suber.
  • Home page, http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/timeline.htm.

    TIPS. See Tools for Innovative Publishing in Science.

    Tools for Innovative Publishing in Science (TIPS).
    A project to produce tools for the open, free, and online dissemination of scientific information, especially in high-speed physics. This includes articles, reviews, searching, and informal communication among researchers. Among its projects is Torii. Sponsored by IST (hence CORDIS).
  • Home page, http://tips.sissa.it:8000/servlets/jetspeed.

    Torii.
    A portal and search engine for OAI-compliant archives. Unlike ARC and Cite-Base, the first two OAI search engines, Torii supports searches by wireless (WAP) devices. Torii is currently limited to the arXiv preprint archive and the Multimedia Database. A project of TIPS (hence IST and CORDIS).
  • Home page, http://torii.sissa.it/torii/index.jsp.

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    U

    UKOLN. See UK Office for Library and Information Networking

    UK Office for Library and Information Networking (UKOLN).
    UK agency for policy and research on digitial information management. Its primary constituents are libraries and cultural heritage institutions in the UK. Among its projects are Cultivate Interactive, DC Dot, the Open Archives Forum, and OpenResolver. UKOLN is funded by JISC.
  • Home page, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/.

    UNESCO. See United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.

    United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
    A UN office charged with promoting collaboration among nations through education, science, culture, and communication. Among its projects are the Directory of Digital Collections, the Memory of the World Programme, and a set of guidelines on the digitization of library and archival material in the public domain (with ICA and IFLA).
  • Home page, http://www.unesco.org/.
  • ICSU-UNESCO statement of principles on electronic publishing in science, http://bestofscience.free.fr/icsu.html.

    University Provosts' Initiative.
    Informal name for the outcome of a conference at CalTech on March 25, 1997, for university provosts and representatives of professional societies. The speakers were Stevan Harnad, Cliff Lynch, Ann Okerson, and Larry Hurtado. The conference participants reached consensus on the desirability of FOS, that the Association of American Universities (AAU) should lead a multi-national consortium to bring about "reliable electronic access to scholarly results", that the conference participants would "encourage and support promising initiatives" and remain in contact with one another.
  • Proceedings of the conference, http://library.caltech.edu/publications/ScholarsForum/proceedings.htm.
  • Charles Phelps' summary of the conference, http://www.econ.rochester.edu/Faculty/PhelpsPapers/Phelps_paper.html. (Phelps was the provost of the University of Rochester and a conference participant.)
  • Anne Buck, Richard Flagan, and Betsy Coles' summary of the conference, http://library.caltech.edu/publications/ScholarsForum/.

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    V

    VHL. See Virtual Health Library.

    Virtual Health Library (VHL).
    A free online archive of health information, designed especially to disseminate the health research and serve the nations of Latin America and the Caribbean. Launched by the Declaration of San José. Sponsored by Brazil's Latin American and Caribbean Center on Health Sciences Information (Bireme) and the World Health Organization. With support from SciELO.
  • Home page, http://www.bireme.br/bvs/I/ihome.htm.

    VTLS, Inc..
    A manufacturer of unicode-based, multi-lingual library automation software.
  • Home page, http://www.vtls.com/index2.shtml.

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    W

    W3C. See World Wide Web Consortium.

    WDDA. See Web Document Digital Archive.

    Web Document Digital Archive (WDDA).
    A repository for electronic documents that aims to ensure long-term access and preservation. From OCLC, GPO, JERRI and other institutions. Uses OAIS. Based on the work of OCLC and RLG on the Digital Preservation Commons.
  • There seems to be no home-page yet, but here's a press release, http://www1.internetwire.com/iwire/iwpr?id=29553&cat=te.

    WoPEc. See Working Papers in Economics.

    Working Papers in Economics (WoPEc).
    A collection of links to free and priced papers in economics. Funded from JISC as part of its eLib program. Now part of Research Papers in Economics (RePEc).
  • Home page, http://netec.mcc.ac.uk/WoPEc.html.

    World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
    The official standard-setting body for the World Wide Web (W3). Founded by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of HTML and the web, in 1994. Now financed primarily by its 500+ commercial, educational, and governmental member organizations. Membership is not free, but is open to any interested group willing to sign the membership agreement. The W3C works on such FOS-related standards as RDF, XML, and the Semantic Web.
  • Home page, http://www.w3.org.

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    X

    XML. See Extensible Mark-Up Language.

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    Y

    A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

    Z

    Z39.50.
    A standard for computer-to-computer information retrieval. The standard allows users to search remote computer systems without knowing the search syntax used locally on those machines. The Z39.50 standard was approved by NISO in 1998.
  • Home page, http://www.loc.gov/z3950/agency/.

  • Glossaries on related topics


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    Peter Suber
    Research Professor of Philosophy, Earlham College
    Open Access Project Director, Public Knowledge
    Senior Researcher, SPARC
    peters@earlham.edu

    Copyright © 2001-2003, Peter Suber. This is an open-access document.