Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Thursday, May 19, 2005

May issue of ScieCom.Info

The May issue of ScieCom.Info is now online. It's largely in Swedish, but there are English versions of the three OA-related articles.
  • Jörgen Eriksson, More content in the institutional repository. Abstract: 'Lund University has no policies on electronic publishing or self-archiving. Neither does the university require any kind of annual standardized or centralized publication lists from faculties or departments. Electronic publishing and self-archiving is a very decentralized affair where departments or divisions make their own decisions. To increase the use of LU:research, the central university archive, and make more full text dissertations available. The Library Head Office is working both towards the university administration to get policy decisions and towards the researchers to get their publications into the repository. In this project we wanted to reach new researchers and try to get their attention by giving them a very specific offer to self-archive named articles for them.'
  • Jostein Helland Hauge, Norway is opening up to Open Access. Abstract: 'During the last few years we have seen in Norway a steadily growing interest in the new scientific communication strategies epitomized by the Open Access (OA) movement. It is interesting to notice that in Norway, like in most other countries, libraries have been the ones that have taken up the cudgels for OA and developed services in the field as a natural extension of their electronic services. Together the universities and colleges have formed a joint OA development group. Two of the main aims are to develop and apply a standard set of metadata and get in place an OAI harvester for all Norwegian materials that are hosted in the repositories of the institutions.'
  • Mathias Klang, Creative Commons Meets Open Access. Abstract: 'The copyright system allows the creator to establish and legally defend ownership rights in intangible creations. The author does not own the tangible expression (e.g. the book) but she does have property rights in its contents. Permission to use is often granted under certain conditions (for example economic remuneration or limitations to extent of use). Obtaining permission can be a complex affair since there are several barriers on the way. In an effort to remove some of these barriers the Creative Commons (CC) project was launched in 2001. Taking inspiration in part from the Free Software Foundation's GNU General Public License the first project of the CC's was the release of a set of copyright licenses free for public use.'