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Friday, July 01, 2005

Playing catch-up: June 27 blog postings

Here are the major blog postings I made by email to SOAF while OAN was down last week. June 27, 2005:

OA presentations from Bonn meeting. The presentations from the 2005 IuK conference, In die Zukunft publizieren: Herausforderungen an das Publizieren und die Informationsversorgung in den Wissenschaften (Bonn, May 9-11, 2005), are now online. Half a dozen are on OA or OA-related topics. (Thanks to Klaus Graf.)
A new, larger list of OA journals. Jan Szczepanski, a librarian at Sweden's Goteborg University, has been collecting links and information on OA journals for years. While the DOAJ lists 1,625 OA journals (today), Jan's collection lists 3,759 current OA journals and 608 historic, retrodigitized OA journals (today). Until now, his collection was not available online. But with his permission, I've posted Jan's files to my site for all to use or download. It was not possible to convert them to HTML, but they should be usable in their present forms. If your browser will not display the files, you should be able to download them. Jan's list is larger than the DOAJ list in part because the DOAJ is working through a backlog, in part because Jan has focused especially on the humanities, and in part because Jan is willing to list journals that are not peer reviewed. Jan would like to be in contact with other librarians willing to collect and share new OA titles. His email address is Jan.Szczepanski@ub.gu.se. Note that these files only represent Jan's collection as of June 27, 2005. He enlarges it continuously, and I won't be able to re-post every update to the files. But I will work with him to find another way to circulate the updates.
Current OA journals
(A large Word file, 3.48 MB.)
Historic or retrodigitized OA journals
(An Excel spreadsheet, 315 KB.)
Update. Many users had trouble with the large DOC file of current OA journals. In response, I've made an HTML version of the file and John Kjellberg has made another version of the DOC file.
More on the publisher-requested moratorium for Google Library. Dan Carnevale and Jeffrey Young, Publishers' Group Asks Google to Stop Scanning Copyrighted Works for 6 Months, Chronicle of Higher Education, July 1, 2005 (accessible only to subscribers). Excerpt: 'The Association of American Publishers has asked Google to stop scanning copyrighted books published by the group's members for at least six months while the company answers questions about whether its plan to scan millions of volumes in five major research libraries complies with copyright law. Allan R. Adler, vice president for legal and governmental affairs at the publishing group, said that the association made its request in a letter, sent June 10, that stopped short of calling for a "cease and desist" of Google's Library Project....Many publishers say that Google does not have the right to scan a copyrighted book. They argue that making a digital copy of a volume for any commercial purpose requires the permission of the copyright holder....Does Google believe it has the right to scan copyrighted books without permission, provided the company -- as it has promised -- offers only short excerpts of those works to the public in search results? "Yes," said [Susan Wojcicki, director of product management for Google Print]. "We believe that our program is fully consistent with fair use under copyright law."' (PS: This is a slightly expanded version of an article blogged here on June 21.)
More on Yahoo Search Subscriptions. Barbara Quint, "Fee" Web Content Accessed by Yahoo! Search Subscriptions, Information Today Newsbreaks, June 27, 2005. Excerpt: 'As part of its intense competition with Google, Yahoo! Search has now begun to extend its reach beyond the free content of the open Web and into the fee-based territory of the deep Web. With the beta launch of Yahoo! Search Subscriptions in the U.S. and the U.K., Yahoo! will enable users to simultaneously search multiple online subscription content sources and Web sources from a single search box. Initial content sources include ConsumerReports.org, IEEE, Forrester Research, the Wall Street Journal Online, the New England Journal of Medicine, TheStreet.com, and the Financial Times. Other major traditional vendors --Factiva, LexisNexis, Thomson Gale Group, and ACM (Association for Computing Machinery)-- have announced participation in the new service with selected content on the way in the next few weeks....Yahoo! Search has aimed at deep Web content for some time. The Content Acquisition Program it initiated early in 2004 specifically went after public databases and legacy systems not spidered by other Web search engines. Even before that, it had an arrangement with Northern Light to access fee-based traditional article content (this was discontinued when Northern Light dissolved its Web search service in 2002). Google's Scholar, Print, and Print Library projects have aimed their service at similar library-style content. In the case of the books digitized in Google Print and Google Print Library, the content is exclusive to Google....At present, Yahoo! has no intention of displaying ads in the Yahoo! Search Subscriptions content, nor is it charging publishers or content providers. "Right now no money is changing hands," said [Tim Mayer, director of product management at Yahoo! Search]. "If we can up the search intensity of existing users and acquire new users, then we can make more money. We have no plans for specific monetization of this new content, beyond regular search listings." The success of the program, according to Mayer, will be measured by "the uptake of the service, if people search more. We have seen lots of publishers contacting us just in the few days since the announcement of the service. There is a lot of interest in joining the program from many major publishers, most of those now for specific journals." '
End of the FAIR coming. Chris Awre, Sharing Resources, JISC Inform, Summer 2005 (scroll down to p. 10). Excerpt: 'A three-year programme looking at how colleges and universities can share their digital resources with one another comes to an end this autumn. The FAIR programme (Focus on Access to Institutional Resources) and its 14 projects have investigated the technologies and the organisational and cultural issues involved in making resources accessible by others, and in doing so have pioneered the development of digital repositories in the UK....The programme has influenced, and been influenced by, the growing open access movement, and many of the outcomes from FAIR have centred on the role of eprints and e-theses. But the sharing of images, of museum object data, and of datasets has also been the subject of projects, and enabled a cross-sectoral perspective on the issues that led to FAIR being initiated.'
Editorial on OA. J. Singh, Open access: To be or not to be? Indian Journal of Pharmacology, 37, 3 (2005) pp. 139-40. An editorial. Excerpt: 'Very few of us will disagree that there is a crisis in the availability of scholarly journals. Skyrocketing costs coupled with a lack of public funding have conspired to make journals disappear from most libraries. Even large academic institutes are becoming wary about using their meagre budgets for print journals with high price tags. Scientists, especially those working in cash-strapped developing countries are at a disadvantage of not being able to access international research....OA serves the interests of many groups, enlarges the audience of authors and increases the visibility and impact of their work and gives readers barrier-free access to the literature they need for their research. The rich and poor are put on an equal footing for these key resources and the need for permissions to reproduce and distribute content is eliminated....The Indian Journal of Pharmacology appreciates all the good that stems from the availability of OA. However it cannot accept the OA movement's stand on copyright. Doing away with copyright can lead to exploitation of published intellectual work by commercial organizations. A drug company, for example, can print and distribute any number of copies of an article without obtaining permission in order to promote its products....IJP will continue to be a Free Access journal and insist on copyright transfer. Readers may make a few copies of any article for personal use and distribute a limited number of copies for non-profit, non-promotional academic activities (such as workshop or lectures) without prior permission. Authors are also free to archive their articles (post-publication) in their personal or institutional repositories and this does not require permission from the journal. The journal intends to share the reprint revenue with the authors and it has no plans to adopt "author pays" model in the foreseeable future.'
Comment. Except on one point, the Singh editorial shows a good understanding of OA. Indeed, much of it is based on my Open Access Overview, a use that I encourage. The exception is where it asserts that OA "does away with copyright". The IJP may have its reasons to put a cap on the number of copies that authors may make for personal use and to block copying by commercial organizations, but it should not mislead readers into thinking that the alternative, embraced by most OA journals, is to eliminate copyright.
Another TA editorial on OA. Mary Paquette, The Public-Access Movement, Perspectives in Psychiatric Care, April 2005. An editorial. Not even an abstract is free online for non-subscribers, at least so far.
A wiki to promote self-archiving. Ari Friedman has launched SelfArchive.org, a wiki designed to help faculty understand self-archiving and start doing it. Because it's a wiki, you can revise and enlarge it.

Posted by Peter Suber at 7/01/2005 12:37:00 PM.