James Jacobs argues that my comments on Trojan Horse PDFs (from yesterday's issue of SOAN) apply to government information, not just to scholarly journal articles. Excerpt: 'These are important issues for government information as well. Governments at all levels rely heavily on PDFs, but this kind of technology will, once available, surely spread to other document distribution formats where control, access, permission, rights, and authenticity are issues. This is very relevant to free, public, fully functional, permanent access to government information. Imagine trying to use the digital government documents that we do manage to get into our libraries (through deposit, if GPO will deposit them, or through downloading and web-crawling projects) if they are still controlled by GPO or the issuing agency in the way Suber describes. There are many questions that need to be asked as GPO (and other government publishers) look for ways to use technology to address the issue of authenticity and as GPO attempts to provide "free and ready public access" to electronic documents....'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/03/2005 11:05:00 AM.
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.
