Bonita Wilson, Unrestricted Access. An editorial noting the success of OA journals, JEP and Ariadne. Excerpt: "Although D-Lib Magazine, the Journal of Electronic Publishing and Ariadne each serve a particular audience, they are complementary in the topics they cover, and they face the same challenges as they strive to provide unrestricted access to the content they disseminate. Few could argue with the goal of timely and open access to high quality scholarly information. New business models are emerging to ensure this goal is met and that such access will continue far into the future. However, it is too early to know whether these models will prove sustainable over the long term."
Titia van der Werf-Davelaar, Facilitating Scholarly Communication in African Studies. Abstract: "Web publishing and its technical possibilities, as well as the open access movement that has accompanied it, have resulted in a number of tendencies with mixed implications for scholarly communication. This article examines the impact of these changes in the field of the African studies, where the North-South divide in scientific publishing poses an additional challenge to the issues at stake. It looks at several initiatives taken by the Africanists community in the Netherlands to bridge the divide, in particular the establishment of a digital platform for African studies. It concludes that these initiatives are all geared towards redressing the balance and establishing open scholarly communication on an equal footing, but that true open access can only be achieved if practiced both ways (by North and South) and not at the expense of academic quality standards. In addition it requires the active commitment of each and every individual scholar. This commitment still needs to grow in Africanist circles."
Henry Jerez and three co-authors, ADL-R: The First Instance of a CORDRA Registry. Astract: "The Advanced Distributed Learning Registry (ADL-R) is a newly operational registration system for distributed e-learning content in the U.S. military. It is the first instance of a registry-based approach to repository federation resulting from the Content Object Repository Discovery and Registration/Resolution Architecture (CORDRA) project. This article will provide a brief overview of CORDRA and detailed information on ADL-R. A subsequent article in this month's issue of D-Lib will describe FeDCOR, which uses the same approach to federate DSpace repositories."
Giridhar Manepalli and two co-authors, FeDCOR: An Institutional CORDRA Registry. Abstract: "FeDCOR (Federation of DSpace using CORDRA) is a registry-based federation system for DSpace instances. It is based on the CORDRA model. The first article in this issue of D-Lib Magazine describes the Advanced Distributed Learning-Registry (ADL-R) [1], which is the first operational CORDRA registry, and also includes an introduction to CORDRA. That introduction, or other prior knowledge of the CORDRA effort, is recommended for the best understanding of this article, which builds on that base to describe in detail the FeDCOR approach."
William Y. Arms and five co-authors, A Research Library Based on the Historical Collections of the Internet Archive. No abstract. From the introduction: "As libraries change, scholarship is also changing. For centuries, academic researchers have combed through the collections of libraries, museums, and archives to analyze and synthesize the information buried within them. As digital libraries expand, we can look forward to a day when humanities and social science scholars replace much of this tedious manual effort with computer programs that act as their agents. This article describes a library that is being built for such research. The collections are some ten billion Web pages from the historical collections of the Internet Archive. Initially, the primary users are social scientists."
Esther Hoorn and Maurits van der Graaf, Copyright Issues in Open Access Research Journals. Abstract: "This article presents results of a survey undertaken as part of a series of work packages under a joint initiative by JISC and SURF to explore the attitudes of authors in the UK and the Netherlands towards Open Access. The Open Access environment has created a number of entirely new copyright models, which stand in contrast to the traditional academic journals in which the copyright has to be transferred from the author(s) to the journal publisher. The following emerging copyright models in OA journals were identified: [1] a model in which the author keeps the copyright: this was preferred by nearly half of the respondents, [2] two models in which the author shares the copyright (with Creative Commons licences): these were preferred by nearly a third of the respondents, [3] a model in which the author transfers only the exploitation rights to the journal publisher: this was preferred by a small minority.
These and other results seem to reflect a desire on the part of academics to change the balance of rights within copyright between authors and publishers in scholarly communication journals. Libraries and academic institutes are already taking part in the scholarly communication copyright debate and could use these results to align their positions with the academics' views."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 2/16/2006 02:39:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
