Welcome to the Free Online Scholarship (FOS) NewsletterFebruary 25, 2002
More on the Budapest Open Access Initiative
Since its launch on February 14, the BOAI has attracted participants and press attention. Over 1,000 individuals and several dozen organizations have signed on during the last week. It's especially gratifying to see among the institutional signatories a growing number of journals, library consortia, and universities. Some of the new names are the Library of Congress, the Association of Research Libraries, the Canadian Association of Research Libraries, the University of Pittsburgh, and the Australian Vice Chancellors Committee.
Remember that you can help the cause by signing the online document, persuading your institution to sign it, and spreading the word. We've also written a good-sized list of specific actions that people can take depending on their position --researchers, librarians, editors, publishers, or representatives of universities, foundations, professional societies, or governments.
This week we've also added French and German translations of the BOAI documents.
BOAI Home page
What you can do to help
BOAI FAQ(The FAQ and the list of ways you can help, above, will remain open to revision.)
See who has signed
Sign it yourself
* Here are some news stories about BOAI that have appeared since the last issue of FOSN
ALPSP response to the BOAI(The only criticism I've seen to date.)
Anon., Budapest Open Access Archive Announced (for _LTWorld_)
Anon., Moves Made to Give Greater Free Access to Research Results (for _Cordis News_)
Declan Butler, Soros Offers Access to Science Papers (for _Nature_)(I listed this piece last week, but at that time I linked to my own copy of the article. Now _Nature_ has put it where it is accessible to non-subscribers.)
Denis Delbecq, L'abordage des revues scientifiques (for _Liberation_)
Peter Evans, Budapest Open Access Initiatives [sic] Launched (For the UK _Serials eNews_)
Stéphane Foucart, Guerre ouverte contre le monopole des revues scientifiques (for _Le Monde_)
Alexander Grimwade, Open Societies Need Open Access (for _The Scientist_)
Jon Gordon, Scholarly Journals on the Net (for _Minnesota Public Radio_) [Requires RealPlayer](This is a radio interview of me. I'm happy with all of it except the way it ends. Gordon closes with the remark that priced journals justify themselves by their role in providing peer review. Period. I didn't get to reply. So he leaves the false impression that BOAI doesn't endorse peer review, doesn't know it costs money, or doesn't have a way to cover the costs. To see how I would have replied, see the BOAI FAQ on these points, above.)
Tamsin McMahon, Billionaire Wants Free Web-Based Academic Journals (for _EuropeMedia.net_)
Richard Poynder, George Soros Gives $3 Million to New Open Access Initiative (for _Information Today_)
Sam Vaknin, Copyright and Scholarship (for _UPI_)(This is a wide-ranging interview of me on FOS issues in which Vaknin let me give long answers and his editor didn't cut anything. I thank them both. BOAI comes up in Part II.)
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Introduction to HINARI
HINARI is a major FOS initiative launched by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Open Society Institute (OSI) and now administered by WHO with support from the BMJ and Yale University Library. The name stands for Health InterNetwork Access to Research Initiative. Under the program, the world's six largest publishers of biomedical journals have agreed to three-tiered pricing. For countries in the lowest tier (GNP per capita below $1k), online subscriptions are free of charge. For countries in the middle tier (GNP per capita between $1k and $3k), online subscriptions will be discounted by an amount to be decided this June. Countries in the top tier pay full price. While HINARI has been on the drawing boards since last spring, it just started delivering free online content to bottom tier countries on January 31.
The six participating publishers are Blackwell Synergy, Elsevier Science Direct, Harcourt IDEAL, Springer Link, Wiley Interscience, and Wolters Kluwer.
The subscriptions are given to universities and research institutions, not to individuals. But they are identical in scope to the subscriptions received by institutions paying the full price.
WHO estimates that there are 500 eligible institutions worldwide in the bottom tier, of which 400 have so far been invited to participate and 100 have already signed up. WHO expects that 200-250 will be signed up by the end of the year. Progress is slowed chiefly by the lack of connectivity, or its high cost, in the areas of greatest need. WHO also estimates that there are 500 eligible institutions in the middle tier, though concentrated in only half as many countries.
The publishers have signed on for 3-5 years under the current terms. The program might be affected by changes in technology, publishing, development, or world events. However, now that a policy framework has been erected, it seems likely that the publishers will continue the program as long as it is needed.
In March, more publishers will join the original six. In June, the participating publishers will announce the discount offered to the middle tier. By the end of this year, WHO hopes to include all the world's biomedical journals in the program. Delivery to middle tier countries should start in January 2003. After that, HINARI might generalize beyond the biomedical fields.
The origin of HINARI can be traced to many sources. One is Kofi Annan's Millennium Report and its accompanying UN initiatives to provide connectivity, content, and training to bridge the digital divide in developing countries. Another is an April 2000 meeting on FOS policy sponsored by WHO at which there were speakers from BMJ and OSI. Another is the editorial for September 30, 2000, by the editors of BioMed Central, BMJ, and the Lancet (and published simultaneously in all three journals) recommending free subscriptions to biomedical journals for developing countries. Another might have been Elsevier CEO Derk Haank's speech at UNESCO's Paris Headquarters on February 2, 2001, urging fellow journal publishers to consider tiered pricing with the bottom tier free of charge.
[I thank Barbara Aronson at WHO for sharing information with me by telephone and email.]
HINARI home page
HIN in HINARI is the Health InterNetwork (from WHO)
World Health Organization
Open Society Institute
BMJ (formerly, British Medical Journal)
WHO Press Release on HINARI, January 31, 2002
WHO Press Release on key HINARI breakthrough (publishers' statement of intent), July 9, 2001
Publishers' Statement of Intent, July 9, 2001
Current list of eligible countries
Kofi Annan's Millennium Report, April 3, 2000
Fiona Godlee, Richard Horton, Richard Smith, "Global Information Flow: Publishers Should Provide Information Free to Resource Poor Countries" (BMJ, 30 (Sept. 30, 2000) pp. 776-77) (Published simultaneously in BMJ, Lancet, and BioMed Central.)
To contact HINARI (e.g. to volunteer to help), send email to <hinari [at] who.int>.
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Ripeness is all
In the last month, three major FOS initiatives were launched at one week intervals. On January 31, HINARI began delivering free content to research institutions in the developing world (story above). On February 6, eight major research library organizations representing 600 research libraries worldwide announced the creation of the pro-FOS International Scholarly Communications Alliance (FOSN for 2/14/02). On February 14, the Budapest Open Access Initiative began its project to expand self-archiving, create open-access journals, and recruit foundations beyond the founding Open Society Institute to help to pay the costs of the transition to open-access science and scholarship (FOSN for 2/14/02).
During the same period a couple of other large initiatives were announced for future launch. The Alliance for Cellular Signaling is the largest FOS experiment yet from _Nature_ (FOSN for 2/14/02). Lawrence Lessig announced the Creative Commons, an organization that will offer free, flexible intellectual property licenses that will simultaneously protect authors and promote open online sharing (FOSN for 2/14/02).
In the previous month, SciDev was launched (FOSN for 1/23/02), BioMed Central implemented its funding model to cover the costs of free online access (FOSN for 1/1/02), and the French Académie des Sciences issued a public statement calling on the European Commission not to apply ordinary copyright rules to scientific publications whose authors do not demand payment (FOSN for 2/14/02).
We could consider the recent convergence of FOS initiatives a statistical fluke. If you wait long enough a coin will come up heads 100 times in a row. But this view of it ignores recent history, which shows a steadily growing number of initiatives, experiments, articles, and endorsements of FOS. This is not so much a fluke as a trajectory that suggests growing recognition of the desirability and feasibility of FOS.
HINARI
International Scholarly Communications Alliance(No home page yet, just the press release of its launch.)
Budapest Open Access Initiative
Alliance for Cellular Signaling
The Creative Commons, beta site
SciDev
BioMed Central
French Académie des Sciences public statement
* Postscript. This week I wrote the first draft of Timeline of the FOS Movement. I wanted to embed this convergence of FOS initiatives in some recent history, see the local trajectory and test for randomness. Have a look. Let me know what you think belongs on such a list.
Timeline of the FOS Movement (first draft)
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Supreme Court to rule on threat to public domain
The Supreme Court announced last week that it will hear the Eric Eldred case during its coming term. Eldred is challenging the constitutionality of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, which retroactively added 20 years to the life of existing copyrights. (The rule is now that works created by individuals are protected for the individual's lifetime plus 70 years, and works created by corporations are protected for 95 years.) Extending the life of copyright delays the transition of copyrighted works into the public domain. Eldred's interest is that he maintains a web site of free full-text books in the public domain.
You may not feel a threat to FOS in copyright extension. But think of it this way. Mark Lemley, a lawyer for the Internet Archive, estimates that without the Bono copyright extension, 9,853 out-of-print books published in 1930 could be put online with no permissions or royalties in 2005. If the Bono Act is upheld, free online access to them will be blocked for another 20 years, perhaps longer if Congress extends copyright again in the future. Further extensions are likely: Congress has extended the term of copyrights 11 times in the last four decades.
Shrinking the public domain through retroactive copyright extension not only harms the interests of readers, and the authors of derivative works, but may violate the constitution's copyright clause, which allows Congress to create copyrights that protect authors' rights "for limited times". Eldred will also argue that retroactive copyright extension violates the First Amendment.
Eldred lost in the lower courts. (See FOSN for 4/24/01, 7/31/01, 1/16/02.) Lawrence Lessig has been his lawyer, and will argue the case before the Supreme Court. The Bush administration opposes Eldred and will argue that the public's right to use content is satisfied by fair-use rights under copyright law and is not harmed by a delayed transition into the public domain.
The content industry, led by Disney, wants to keep its intellectual property from entering the public domain for as long as possible, and will not stop lobbying for further copyright extensions. The copyright on Mickey Mouse would have expired in 2003, a calamity that many believe the Bono Act was designed to avert. If true (as I said in a recent interview), this is a "grotesque inversion of values".
News coverage of the Supreme Court's decision to take the Eldred case
Eldred's web collection of full-text books, Eldritch Press
Eldred's "Support Online Books" page (includes links to other relevant pages)
OpenLaw page on the Eldred case(OpenLaw is to litigation what open source is to software. If you are qualified, register yourself and join the strategy discussion.)
Zimram Ahmed explains why copyright extension costs everyone(Thanks to Politech.)
Jacob Sullum explains why it is unconstitutional and bad policy to boot(Thanks to Freedom News Daily.)
Dennis Karjala's page of news and links opposing copyright extension
My discussion of copyright extension (in Part II of Sam Vaknin's interview with me for UPI)
* Postscript. Courts rarely face FOS issues directly. The reason is simply that FOS isn't illegal and no bill or legislation I've ever seen would outlaw it. But many acts of legislation have the potential to slow it down, narrow its scope, or close off one of the many avenues it could pursue. From this point of view, the Eldred case is among the most important FOS cases yet brought to the Supreme Court, on a par with Tasini last June.
FOS is entirely compatible with copyright as it is, and does not depend on the public domain. Therefore, Eldred could go either way and many forms of FOS would be completely unaffected. But this case matters for FOS because the public domain is one very important avenue of FOS, even if not the only one.
Why FOS is compatible with copyright
Why FOS doesn't need the public domain
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Developments
* A recent survey of chemists by DK Associates reveals that their most-used online source of chemical information is ChemWeb, followed closely by Google --two free sources. (PS: ChemWeb is owned by Elsevier but developed by Current Science, the same people who developed BioMed Central. I'm not surprised that Google is on the short list. I'd bet that similar surveys in any other discipline would put Google in the top two or three. This is remarkable since it is not optimized for scholarship and includes peer-reviewed, unreviewed, and crank writings without discrimination. However, its sort algorithm doesn't rank them equally. It uses the network of links as a kind of communal peer review. Even though the peers in this network are academics and non-academics, the algorithm still tends to make worthy work rise higher in its sort list than unworthy work.)
* When the free online journals published by SciELO were included in ISI, their visibility grew quickly. Researchers from Oxford University report in the January 21 _Nature_, that the average impact factor of the SciELO journals covered by ISI grew 133.7% since their inclusion. SciELO produces scientific journals for Brazil, Latin America, and the Caribbean. (PS: This shows that while open access increases visibility and impact, recognition by channels already used and respected by scholars can boost visibility and impact even further. Not a surprise but a reminder that accessibility is necessary but not sufficient for impact.)(Thanks to Serials eNews.)
* Search Engine Watch has announced its award-winners for 2001. Highlights: Google won for Outstanding Search Service (and four other awards). Scirus won for Best Specialty Search Engine.
* The Krazsna-Krausz Moving Image Book Awards were awarded in London on February 5. The two top prize-winners took home £5,000 each. They were _Writing Himself into History: Oscar Micheaux, His Silent Films and His Audiences_ by Perl Bowser and Louise Spece (Rutgers University Press) and _Special Effects: The History and Technique_ by Richard Rickitt (Virgin Books and Billboard Books).
* The University of British Columbia is developing an "Education Commons" to integrate all the free online teaching and learning resources used by its faculty.
* A journal that often carried FOS-related articles, _The Future of Print Media_, has died.(Thanks to Walt Crawford.)
* CrossRef and SFX are now fully integrated. 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.
* Douglas Rushkoff has found a print publisher for _Exit Strategy_, his "open source" novel. The book was published online last July so that readers could enlarge it with their own footnotes (FOSN for 11/26/01). Soft Skull Press will soon publish the novel in print; the footnotes will stay on the web, where they will continue to grow.
* The license agreement for Network Associates (NA) software prohibits the publication of reviews of the software without the company's approval. New York State is suing the company to remove the restrictive covenant from the license. NA says it only wants to make sure that reviewers are evaluating the newest versions of its products. (PS: This case raises some deep questions. Clearly users have a right to review NA software without approval, at least until they consent to waive this right. Is it about time to say that tearing open shrink-wrap is not a valid manifestation of consent? If consent to licensing terms can waive rights created by copyright law, such as fair use, does it follow that it can waive fundamental free speech rights as well? If so, should NY stay out of the picture and let users decide when to waive their rights? Could a journal publisher add a similar covenant to the license it offers to libraries? Could institutional consent to such a license bind all the employees of the institution?)
* SightSound Technologies has won a court decision that it owns the patent on downloading music and video. (PS: What is disturbing about this judgment is not that it thwarts the Napster movement, which is not relevant to FOS, but that a company could patent the downloading of music and video. If this can be patented, why not the downloading of text? The wires don't know and don't care how humans interpret the bits. The decision is also disturbing because it will hinder FOS as scholars learn to take better advantage of the internet as a medium of scholarship and, at least in some fields, increasingly rely on multi-media to report their research results.)
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New on the net
* The Resource Libraries Group (RLG) has created a discussion list for those implementing the Open Archival Information Systems (OAIS) reference model. Subscription is free.
* Bentham Science Publishers is offering free online access to all of its 2000 and 2001 journals during 2002, but only during 2002. Access is through ingenta. (PS: What's going on here? A year from now, will Bentham really see enough revenue in these back issues to reinstate price limitations on access?)(Thanks to the Manchester Metropolitan University Library.)
* Oregon State University is scanning Linus Pauling's notebooks and putting the images online free of charge. The collection will include notebooks from 1922 to 1994, and should be complete on February 28. Since the OSU story says nothing about payment, I assume Pauling's estate donated these papers, unlike Francis Crick, who got $2.5 million for his (see FOSN for 12/26/01, 1/1/02). Linus Pauling was the only man to win two unshared Nobel prizes (Chemistry in 1954, Peace in 1962). He died in 1994.
* Version 41 of Charles W. Bailey, Jr.'s Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography is now online. The new edition cites more than 1,550 articles, books, and other printed and electronic sources on the publication of online scholarship.
* The text-e online seminar has moved on to a new text, "The New Architecture of Information" by Stephana Broadbent and Francesco Cara. This paper will be the subject of the online discussion until February 28.
* The Public Knowledge Project at the University of British Columbia has released a Research Support Tool (RST) to accompany content posted to its online publishing system. When users pull up an article, the RST will automatically create a sidebar of links to useful auxiliary information. There is a working demo at the site. The RST has been implemented so far only for the field of education, but it will soon extend to other disciplines.
* The UBC's Public Knowledge Project has also released Open Conference Systems, free software for organizing scholarly conferences and publishing their proceedings to the internet.
* There's an interesting discussion now taking place on ERIL-L (Electronic Resources in Libraries) on the question whether library bibliographic records should contain links to Amazon and other commercial bookstores so that researchers can take advantage of their online reviews, tables of contents, and other services, including of course the possibility of purchase.(Free registration required.)
* Peek-a-booty has finally launched. Peek-a-booty is a P2P program for bypassing censorship imposed by governments, ISP's, employers, schools, or libraries (see FOSN for 5/25/01, 7/10/01). It was supposed to launch in July 2001, but was delayed to plug some security holes. Although it has now launched, its developers say it won't be secure enough to use for another six months. Peek-a-booty is especially promising because the previous leader in this niche, SafeWeb, recently removed its free service from the web, at least temporarily (FOSN for 9/21/01, 11/26/01).
Peek-a-booty home page
News stories on the launch
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In other publications
* In the March issue of the _MIT Technology Review_, Wade Rousch asks whether we are witnessing the death of digital rights management. The question doesn't arise because content companies are abandoning DRM in favor of free online access, but because the DRM providers are slashing their workforces and going out of business. Rousch's diagnosis: partly the dot-com recession, partly "technological shortcomings" of DRM (some which hurt the provider, some which hurt the reader or consumer), partly a shortage of paying customers for DRM-protected online content, partly a shake-out and consolidation of the DRM manufacturers. I sense another factor implicit in Rousch's discussion: corporate indecision about what the software should do, that is, how much it should alienate users in order to protect providers.
* Also in the March _MIT Technology Review_, Seth Shulman reports on the November 9-11 conference on the public domain at Duke University (FOSN for 11/26/01). What makes the conference notable for Shulman is the way it brought different kinds of intellectual property (IP) activists together the way the environmental movement brought different kinds of environmental activists together. Once we realized that environmental issues were interwoven, groups that differed in focus or emphasis had good reasons to work together. IP activists are now coming to the same realization. "These issues are interwoven because they all involve balancing similar kinds of private and public needs in a knowledge-based economy. And yet, the various parties -—from the League for Programming Freedom to the American Library Association-— have tended to work in isolation on their own narrow sets of issues. But the parochialism is fading as parties learn they’re arguing about the same issues. Which is why the Duke meeting could go down as a watershed: it marked the start of an organized movement to protect the conceptual commons."(Thanks to Red Rock Eater.)
* In the March issue of _Cites & Insights_, Walt Crawford responds to the Theodore Zeldin and Jason Epstein symposium papers at Text-e. (He responded to four other Text-e symposium papers in the February issue.) He also evaluates the last 2001 issue of _Library Hi Tech_, which is devoted to ebooks, and has kind words for FOSN, saying it "provides a fine mix of personal commentary and annotated links." Thanks, Walt.
* In a guest editorial in the March issue of _New Architect_, John Perry Barlow interprets the current state of copyright law. "[J]ust as sharing makes us civilized, it's sharing that makes civilization....I know that this is a fairly obvious observation. That's why I'm stunned that so many kinds of sharing have suddenly, without public debate, become criminal acts. For instance, lending a book to a friend is still all right, but letting him read the same book electronically is now a theft." In discussing the DeCSS and Felten cases: "Suddenly, it's as though there is no difference between discussing murder and committing it."
* In a February 21 posting to _WoPEc_ (of a July 2001 paper), Robert Parks argues that not even free online journals will solve the serials crisis because free online journals will not give authors an incentive to submit their works to them rather than to the priced journals. He doesn't predict that FOS will fail to materialize, only that at best it will co-exist with priced journals. Some of his arguments are very weak: authors don't really want more readers, because this costs them additional time in responding to their queries. When editorial boards resign to create FOS journals, they are replaced. Readers don't care whether journals cost a lot of money provided their institutions pay the costs. (PS: Parks gives many reasons to think that incentives to use priced journals might persist. But he does very little to show that these incentives are strong, durable, or weightier than contrary incentives. Author incentives are an important problem for FOS. But all the indicia of significance and prestige can belong to FOS journals, even if cultivating them takes time. And already FOS journals give authors a larger audience, superior visibility, and greater impact, which are overriding incentives for a growing number of authors.)
* In a February 18 article in the _New York Times_, Sarah Milstein describes the rise of a defensive intellectual property tactic: instead of obtaining patents or copyrights, putting the ideas into the public domain so that competitors cannot patent or copyright them. (PS: When self-interest joins good policy, good policy is sure to prevail.)
* The February issue of _D-Lib_ Magazine contains several FOS-related articles.
Stewart Granger, "Digital Preservation and Deep Infrastructure"
Makx Dekkers and Stuart L. Weibel, "Dublin Core Metadata Initiative Progress Report and Workplan for 2002"
John Kirriemuir, "Video Gaming, Education and Digital Learning Technologies: Relevance and Opportunities" (see FOSN for 10/5/01)
Eric F. Van de Velde, "OpenURL Standardization Moving Forward"
Peter J. Quinn, "The Astrophysical Virtual Observatory"
Susanne Dobratz, Birgit Matthaei, and Dr. Peter Schirmbacher, "Open Archives Forum"
* In the February 17 _New York Times_, William Broad reports on steps taken by the Bush administration to block public access to ever larger bodies of scientific knowledge in order to keep it out of the hands of terrorists.
In the February 20 _Chronicle of Higher Education_ Kate Galbraith tells the comparable story in Britain.(Accessible only to CHE subscribers.)
Another story on the British development, this one accessible without subscription.
* In a February 18 _CNN_ story, Scarlet Pruitt reviews recent DMCA litigation for the general public, including the Sklyarov and Felten cases. This is a good introduction to the many problems identifiefd in the DMCA.
* In a February 15 article for _LLRX.com_, Mary Minow summarizes the implications of the USA PATRIOT Act for the privacy of library patrons using library internet terminals.
* In a February 13 story for _Salon_, Christopher Dreher reports on the rise of government demands that bookstores reveal who is buying what.(Thanks to LIS News.)
* The February issue of _RLG DigiNews_ contains several FOS-related articles.
Trevor Jones and Beth Sandore, "We don't know the first thing about digitization"
Kizer Walker, "Integrating a Free Digital Resource: The Status of 'Making of America' in Academic Library Collections"
Feature on METS: Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard
* The February issue of _Cultivate Interactive_ has a large number of FOS-related articles.
David Fuegi, "Russia Joins the Cultivate Family"
Silke Grossman et al., "Regnet: Cultural Heritage in Regional Networks"
Gordon Clapworthy, "BioNet"
Adelheit Stein et al., "The COLLATE Collaboratory"
John Perkins, "Disclosing Digital Cultural Wealth: Museums and the Open Archives Initiative"("Sustained testing of the OAI protocol seems a logical and sensible research initiative that will bring us closer to making the rich information resources museums hold more widely available to researchers and other users.")
Monica Segbert, "[Digital Library] News from the Russian State Library"
Edwin Klijn, "SEPIA: Safeguarding European Photographic Images for Access"
Esther Gregory and Michael Ryan, "CHILDE: Children's Historical Literature Disseminated Throughout Europe"
Carol Peters, "Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF)"
Annette Kelly and Caroline Clery, "Activate: New Access And Services For Cultural Content"
Miloš Drdácký and Jan Válek, "ARCCHIP: Advanced Research Centre for Cultural Heritage Interdisciplinary Projects"
Monika Segbert, Anna Maria Balogh and Rima Kupryte and Darius Cuplinskas, "eIFL: Electronic Information for Libraries"(A good introduction to this important program and some related programs with which it achieves synergy. "There are many projects supported by the European Union that can and could use the network created through the eIFL network to transfer knowledge and research results, enable closer networking with institutions in the EU, and aid capacity building pioneered in the 10 years of OSI operations in the region.")
* In a position paper presented at the NSF Workshop on Open Source Software (last revised 2/4/02), Walt Scacchi explores the "processes, practices, and communities that give rise to open source software". Scacchi makes cultural observations about open source developers that transfer well to the scholars in the FOS movement. For example: "[O]pen source developers appear to have a unique work culture including priorities such as seeking the truth, developing a professional reputation through software development, believing in the value of free software, and pursuing their own preferences in work." Scacchi points out that physicists are more likely to believe that open source software advances research than scientists in genomics and other fields closely tied to potential patents.(Thanks to Red Rock Eater.)
* _NewScientist_ has published a series of letters to the editor about its experiment with copyleft (see FOSN for 2/6/02).
* In a recent but undated story for _KnoxNews_, Larisa Brass describes how the digital revolution has changed the job description of librarians.(Thanks to LIS News.)
* In a recent working paper posted to Indiana University's Center for Social Informatics, Rob Kling and two co-authors describe what they call "Guild Publishing" as a fifth model of free online scholarly publishing, after ejournals, hybrid paper-electronic journals, authors posting to their own web sites, and self-archiving to institutional or disciplinary archives. Guild Publishing is the free online dissemination of working papers or technical reports sponsored by academic departments or research institutes. For example, all major U.S. computer science departments, and 250 others around the world, sponsor research manuscript series, as do all major research institutes of high energy physics. Kling and his co-authors enumerate six advantages of Guild Publishing: local control, ease of innovation, quality control through "career review" (based on the reputation of the department or institute), accessibility, economy, and compatibility with other publishing models. They also list three disadvantages.
* In another recent working paper posted to IU's CSI, Rob Kling traces the evolution of E-Biomed into PubMed Central. He studies postings to discussion lists and concludes that Harold Varmus' original idea for E-Biomed responded to criticism and objections raised by publishers and scientific societies. An incidental conclusion of some weight is that "scientific societies and individual scientists they represent do not always have identical interests, especially in regards to scientific e-publishing".
* In a January 15 story in _UPI_, Sam Vaknin explores the future of electronic publishing, commercial publishers' clumsy embrace of the internet, and the prospect that priced online content can attract a paying audience. He predicts that online commercial publishing will start to flourish "as hardware improves and becomes ubiquitous, as content becomes more attractive, as more versatile information taxonomies are introduced, as the Internet becomes more gender-neutral, polyglot, and cosmopolitan....This renaissance will probably be aided by the gradual decline of print magazines and by a strengthening movement for free open source scholarly publishing."
* The January issue of _Information Research_ is devoted to Cross-Lingual Information Retrieval Research.
* In the January issue of the _Journal of the Medical Library Association_, Rollo Turner explains why electronic journals have not reduced journal prices or simplified licensing contracts. (PS: The good news is that most of the costs Turner identifies for ejournals exist only for priced journals that want to restrict access to paying customers.)(Thanks to Shelflife.)
* In a December 10 article in _The Scientist_, Isaac Ginsburg argues that the tendency to disregard older research literature is a threat to honest science. He enumerates several causes for this "Disregard Syndrome". Not on his list, but implicit in his discussion of the "pre-Medline era", is the tendency of researchers to prefer the convenience of free online searches to the inconvenience of paper searches, even if free online searches are limited in scope to recent literature. (PS: True. We just have to be careful not to confuse the solution with the problem. The solution is to extend the convenience of FOS to more of scientific literature, not to retreat from this convenience. For more, see my comments on the death of Ellen Roche in FOSN for 8/23/01.)
The January 21 issue contains several letters to the editor on the Disreegard Syndrome.
Eugene Garfield's commentary on the Disregard Syndrome.(Thanks to LIS News.)
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Following up
* Noam Chomsky's Turkish publisher has been acquitted of violating Turkey's anti-terrorist laws by publishing Chomsky's latest book of essays. (For the background, see FOSN for 1/30/02.)(Accessible only to CHE subscribers.)
* California Supreme Court will hear the Bunner appeal, the state-court version of the DeCSS case (see FOSN for 12/5/01). Bunner won a lower-court decision that the First Amendment gave him the right to publish the DeCSS source code for bypassing copy-protection on DVD's.
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Conferences
If you plan to attend one of the following conferences, please share your observations with us through our discussion forum.
* Integrating @ Internet Speed: Strategies for the Content Community [conference on reference linking]Philadelphia, February 24-27
* Getting your message across: How learned societies and other organizations can influence public and government opinionLondon, February 25
* Electronic Journals --Solutions in Sight?London, February 25-26
* [Public lecture], Will Thomas and Ed Ayers, "The Next Generation of Digital Scholarship: An Experiment in FormWashington, D.C., February 27
* Meeting of the Digital Preservation CoalitionLondon, February 27
* A Symposium on the Research Value of Printed Materials in the Digital AgeCollege Park, Maryland, March 1
* International Spring School on the Digital Library and E-publishing for Science and TechnologyGeneva, March 3-8
* CURL ePrints WorkshopGlasgow, March 4
* Search Engine StrategiesBoston, March 4-5
* Redefining [Digital] Preservation (ARL and the University of Michigan)Ann Arbor, Michigan, March 7-8
* Towards an Information Society for AllBerlin, March 8-9
* Knowledge Technologies Conference 2002Seattle, March 10-13
* 17th ACM Symposium on Applied Computing. Special tracks on Database and Digital Library Technologies; Electronic Books for Teaching and Learning; and Information Access and RetrievalMadrid, March 10-14
* Digitization for Cultural Heritage Professionals: An Intensive ProgramChapel Hill, North Carolina, March 10-15
* EUSDIC Spring Meeting. E-Content: Divide or RuleParis, March 11-12
* Open Publish 2001Seattle, March 11-14
* ARL Workshop on Interactive Publishing of Data on the WebCharlottesville, Virginia, March 11-15
* Computers in Libraries 2002Washington D.C., March 13-15
* International Conference on the Statistical Analysis of Textual DataSt. Malo, March 13-15
* The Electronic Publishers Coalition (EPC) conference on ebooks and epublishing (obscurely titled, Electronically Published Internet Connection, or EPIC)Seattle, March 14-16
* Digital Resources and International Information Exchange: East-WestMarch 15 (Washington DC), 18 (Flushing NY), 20 (Stamford CT)
* Internet Librarian International 2002London, March 18-20
* The New Information Order and the Future of the ArchiveEdinburgh, March 20-23
* Institute of Mueum and Library Services. Building Digital CommunitiesBaltimore, March 20-22
* Advanced Licensing WorkshopDallas, March 20-22
* Electronic Publishing StrategyLondon, March 22
* OCLC Institute. Steering by Standards. (A series of satellite videoconferences.)Cyberspace. OAI, March 26. OAIS, April 19. Metadata standards in the future, May 29.
* WebSearch UniversitySan Francisco, March 25-26; Stamford CT, April 30 - May 1; Washington DC, September 23-24; Chicago, Octeober 22-23; Dallas, November 19-20.
* European Colloquium on Information Retrieval ResearchGlasgow, March 25-27
* e-Content: Discovering and Delivering ValueToronto, March 25-27
* New Developments in Digital LibrariesCiudad Real, Spain, April 2-3
* The New Information Order and the Future of the ArchiveEdinburgh, March 20-23
* Copyright Management in Higher Education: Ownership, Access and ControlAdelphi, Maryland, April 4-5
* Global Knowledge Partnership Annual MeetingAddis Ababa, April 4-5
* International Conference on Information Technology: Coding and ComputingLas Vegas, April 8-10
* NetLab and Friends: 10 Years of Digital Library DevelopmentLund, April 10-12
* E-Content 2002 (on ebooks)London, April 11
* Censorship and Free Access to Information in Libraries and on the InternetCopenhagen, April 11
* International Learned Journals Seminar: We Can't Go On Like This: The Future of JournalsLondon, April 12
* SIAM International Conference on Data MiningArlington, Virginia, April 11-13
* Creating access to information: EBLIDA workshop on getting a better deal from your information licencesThe Hague, April 12
* Licensing Electronic Resources to LibrariesPhiladelphia, April 15
* United Kingdom Serials Group Annual Conference and ExhibitionUniversity of Warwick, April 15- 17
* Conference on Computers, Freedom, and PrivacySan Francisco, April 16-19
* EDUCAUSE Networking 2002Washington, D.C., April 17-18
* Museums and the Web 2002Boston, April 17-20
* Legal Guidelines for Use of Intellectual Property in Higher EducationOneonta, NY, April 19
* Information, Knowledges and Society: Challenges of A New EraHavana, April 22-26
* DAI Institute on The State of Digital Preservation: An International PerspectiveWashington, D.C., April 24-25
* The European Library: The Gate to Europe's Knowledge: Milestone ConferenceFrankfurt am Main, April 29-30
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Peter Suber
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