Peter Suber, Open Access News
Prices for site licence access to The EMBO Journal and EMBO reports will be reduced by 9% in 2010, reflecting the increased publication of Open Access content in 2008. Nature Publishing Group (NPG) and the European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO) announced the decision today, following ratification by the EMBO Council.
First break [...]

Petition for OA to publicly-funded research in the US
The organizations sponsoring the petition are the Alliance for Taxpayer Access (ATA), American Association of Law Libraries (AALL), American Library Association (ALA), Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), FreeCulture, Knowledge Ecology International (KEI), Public Knowledge (PK), and the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC).

OA because it supports mirrors, mashups, and mining

The Creative Commons Attribution License under which open access articles are made available by both BioMed Central and PLoS allows others to create sites that incorporate the content of these articles, so long as the original source is clearly acknowledged. Two ways to do this are mashups [...]

Christina’s LIS Rant: AAP hires a PR firm to fight back against open access
The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics: Stop fighting the inevitable – and free funds for OA!
Peter Suber, Open Access News
Peter Suber, Open Access News
Peter Suber, Open Access News
Peter Suber, Open Access News
Peter Suber, Open Access News
Caveat Lector » AAP/PSP Response, Translated
Peter Suber, [...]

Boing Boing: Our faulty intuition about open systems

Jamie Boyle’s latest Financial Times column points up a cognitive bias we seem to have against open systems — on their face, open networks, encyclopedias, and software projects seem unlikely, even doomed. Our intuition about closed-vs-open is often wrong:

Peter Suber, Open Access News
More evidence that journal prices don’t correlate with quality or impact

Peter Suber, Open Access News

The software giant on Thursday launched the Open XML Translator project on SourceForge.net, a popular site for hosting code-sharing projects. The software will be available under the BSD open-source license.
The software, developed by a France-based Microsoft partner, will allow people to use Microsoft Office to open and save documents in the [...]

Peter Suber, Open Access News
Springer proposes a policy that would require full-text open access immediately upon publication –provided that the policy makes clear that publishing in peer-reviewed journals is an inseparable part of research and therefore that the funds for doing so (article processing fees) will be available to researchers as a special overhead on [...]

The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics: Congrats to U.S. Senators Cornyn & Lieberman!
Experience has shown that a request to deposit research articles is not enough; this led to a dismal 4% compliance rate. A clear-cut mandate to deposit is what is needed, and what the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) of 2006 accomplishes. FRPAA [...]

Open Access News

Paradise Publishers Inc, a web based publishing firm acquired the website www.Free-eBooks.net earlier this month….The site currently generates over 26 million hits monthly and Paradise Publishers Inc. plans to increase traffic tremendously by creating the world’s largest free e-book online database. “We want to be people’s source of information” says Nicolas Gremion, [...]

OA Librarian: Stats Canada electronic docs at no charge!
Effective April 24, all electronic publications on Statistics Canada’s Web site will be available free of charge.

Boing Boing: EFF publishes “7 Years Under the DMCA” paper

DMCA Delays Disclosure of Sony-BMG “Rootkit” Vulnerability
Cyber-Security Czar Notes Chill on Research
Censorware Research Obstructed
Scientists and Programmers Withhold Research
Foreign Scientists Avoid U.S.
IEEE Wrestles with DMCA

The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics: The Dramatic Growth of Open Access: March 31, 2006 Update
With statistics!

Open Access News
Does the OA movement need a central organization?
Absolutely. Look at Firefox. It has taken both the concentrated efforts of a the Mozilla Foundation and the enthusiastic preaching of it’s users to get it into the public eye (not that it still doesn’t have a long way to go). OA has the [...]

Evidence Based Library and Information Practice is OA and looks really interesting but having the articles in PDF only is going to cut into their readership. Who has time (or patience) to wait for a download of an article you’re not sure you really want?

Open Access News

Frank McCown and three co-authors, Search Engine Coverage of the OAI-PMH Corpus, IEEE Internet Computing, March/April 2006.
Abstract: The major search engines are competing to index as much of the Web as possible. Having indexed much of the surface Web, search engines are now using a variety of approaches to index the deep [...]

Newfound Press: University of Tennessee Libraries
The University of Tennessee Libraries is developing a framework to make scholarly and specialized works available worldwide. Newfound Press, the University Libraries digital imprint, advances the community of learning by experimenting with effective and open systems of scholarly communication. Drawing on the resources that the university has [...]

OA as a campaign issue in a student government election

Gavin Baker is running for the Student Senate at the University of Florida. Baker co-founded the Florida chapter of Free Culture and is making open access a campaign issue.
… His candidacy and position could make a difference: At UF, the Student Senate controls an $11 million [...]

Open Access News
Tom Wilson, Open access and Weblogs – working together, Information Research Weblog, February 10, 2006.
We’ve had occasional instances of the value of Weblogs in spreading news about papers in Information Research and we have another at the moment. Nahyun Kwon’s paper on virtual reference service has been noted in a number [...]

OpenDOAR
OpenDOAR (the Directory of Open Repositories) has officially launched its list of OA archives and repositories.

Open Access News
Comment. There are two OA connections here. First, skyrocketing journal prices in the sciences have caused most research libraries to cut into their book budgets, which has greatly reduced the demand for monographs, which has greatly reduced the number of new book manuscripts accepted by university presses. If spreading OA can help libraries [...]

LibriVox
LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain, and then we release the audio files back onto the net (podcast and catalog). Our objective is to make all books in the public domain available, for free, in audio format on the internet. We are a totally volunteer, open source, free content, public domain [...]

Open Access News- Effect of open access on citation rates for a small biomedical journal
CONCLUSIONS. Open access was associated with increase in the number of citations received by the articles. It also decreased the lag time between publication and the first citation. For smaller biomedical journals, OA could be one of the means for [...]

Why We Need Institutional Repositories
This new generation of institutional repositories does not compete with existing databases, it complements and extends them. At the same time, it reaffirms the position of an institution (in the case of a university) as a scholarly center and community hub.

Open Access journals get impressive impact factors- Journals published by BioMed Central have again received impact factors that compare well with equivalent subscription titles, with five titles in the top five of their specialty. The high impact factors for these journals affirm that they are respected by researchers, and are fast becoming the place [...]

I [Magnus Enger] have created colLib – a prototype of a system for organizing and finding documents that are available in Open Access repositories:

Harvesting and tagging of open access library and information science articles, complete with a meta-search function!

The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics: The Institutional Repository, the Author & the Academy

A few weeks ago, I placed a peer-reviewed preprint in SFU’s D-Space called The Dramatic Growth of Open Access: Implications and Opportunities for Resource Sharing and sent a note about the article to a few of the listservs I participate in. Within [...]

Boing Boing: Nobel economist on harm lurking in copyright monopolies

Joseph E. Stiglitz is a Nobel-laureate economist who has advised the US government on its copyright and patent trade policies and served as Senior VP of the World Bank. In a stirring editorial in the Pakistan Daily Times, Stiglitz talks about the economic irrationality that arises [...]

Open Access News (Formerly: FOS News)
A publisher attests to the economics of OA publishing

Peter Scott’s Library Blog
Copyright, a new open-access, peer-reviewed journal led by a renowned editorial team, seeks papers on all aspects of copyright in the Internet age. The journal features an extremely rapid review and publication time while maintaining rigorous standards on the quality of work

TechnoBiblio: Dueling Databases
The American Chemical Society (ACS) has recently called for NIH to restrict the information available in its freely accessible database. ACS’s complaint? It claims that PubChem is in direct competition with its own fee-based Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS).

Wasn’t there a recent to-do about the free information from the National Weather Service? It makes [...]

The Online Books Page
Listing over 20,000 free books on the Web With a RSS feed of new entries.

Boing Boing: Savage, brilliant essay on DRM

Don Marti’s posted a scorching, brilliant essay on DRM and why it won’t work and why it doesn’t work and why we should stop trying to make it work.

Open Access and Repositories: Hot Topics reviews the OA session at SLA with some interesting details.

The Importance of Open Access, Open Source, and Open Standards…

These benefits of open access, open source, and open standards are numerous. The benefits include lower costs, great accessibility, and better prospects for long-term preservation of scholarly works. Libraries should embrace all three of these concepts now and in the future. By supporting open access, open [...]

In an attempt to get my unread list in mt aggregator down to something managable, I present the inevitable link list (annotated because some librarians are born, not made).

ALA | Patriot Act Extension Debated at Closed Congressional Meeting

In a closed-door meeting May 26, the Senate Intelligence Committee failed to agree on a proposal that would [...]

E-LIS RSS Feed

I’ve been using E-LIS for a while, but I didn’t realize that they had come out with a feed for the latest additions to their database.

It looks like a great resource. I would request a way to get a feed from a search though.

Judge blocks Anti-Piracy Ruling at Forever Geek
Basically, there was a recent decision by the FCC to force all manufacturers of Televisions (and anything capable of receiving a TV signal.. that’s right computers too…) to install technology capable of interpreting a “broadcast flag” that would signify a program was not to be allowed to be recorded. [...]

Peter Scott’s Library Blog
Peter Suber, editor of the highly popular Open Access News, has produced an excellent, extensive list of practical steps people can take to move Open Access forward. Whether you are a faculty member, a librarian, student, a society, funder or government body, Suber provides many suggestions for positive contributions you can make [...]

librarian.net:DRM isn’t just ineffective, it does active harm

the EFF states …[DRM] has been in wide deployment for a decade with no benefit to artists and with substantial cost to the public and to due process, free speech and other civil society fundamentals.

Boing Boing: US gov’t to apply DRM to public, non-copyrighted info that you already paid for
…the Government Printing Office, is proposing a new set of policies that will drastically reduce free access to government information. Three librarians from the University of California San Diego have written an article about the details.

On a different topic, are [...]

BioMed Central provides MARC records to facilitate the cataloging of their large collection of Open Access journals. A delimited spreadsheet containing titles, URLs, ISSNs, journal abbreviation and date of initial publication is also available.
Peter Scott’s Library Blog

Writing in the Toronto Star, Michael Geist argues that when Canada gives public money to scientific researchers, that it should require that the research be made available to the public through open-content publishing, rather than locked up in expensive journals that require Canadians to buy the research they’ve already paid for.
Boing Boing: Canadian-funded research should [...]

Cory Doctorow’s talk on DRM has been formatted as a print-centric PDF. Perfect for educating people without getting too mixed up in the tech terms.
as a print-centric PDF

I’ve actually responded in detail to the article.

Under its program, for a fee, BMC will �build, launch, maintain, and populate� repositories for institutions that could not otherwise afford to, or may lack the infrastructure or technical capacity in-house. Institutions can choose to pay a �one-off set-up fee,� to BMC, which will then build a repository to an institution�s requirements. They can hire [...]

Paul Chiao and Christian Schmidt, Open Access gains attention in scholarly communication, Molecular Cancer, September 6, 2004. An editorial describing the OA policy of this OA journal, published by BioMed Central, and enumerating seven benefits of OA. Excerpt: “[1] All articles become freely and universally accessible online; so an author’s work can be read by [...]

OJOSE (Online JOurnals Search Engine) is a new academic search engine. It covers a large number of free and priced journals and databases, and even some books. When a search brings up priced content, you will usually see a citation and abstract; clicking for full-text can bring up a pay-per-view offer, the full-text (if you [...]

…the National Institutes of Health has established a policy mandating open access to the full text of research results from projects it funds. Conservative estimates have placed at least a quarter of the quality medical research done in the world as funded by NIH grants and contracts.
All the material will end up deposited at PubMed [...]

There’s more to the open-access movement than financial reasons.
Re-analysis of clinical trials recently made open access has confirmed the link between suicidal tendency and paroxetine, a member of the class of antidepressants known as SSRIs. The link had previously been suspected but was difficult to establish because the studies were not readily available.
Open Access [...]

The NIH has released its open-access plan, Enhanced Public Access to NIH Research Information (September 3, 2004) for public comment. Excerpts:
This notice is to announce and to seek public comments regarding NIH�s plans to facilitate enhanced public access to NIH health related research information. NIH intends to request that its grantees and supported Principal Investigators [...]

Vinod Scaria has launched a beta version of Journal Central, a portal and search engine for open-access medical journals. The site is still under construction but already has separate lists of journals that are free for all and journals that are free for developing countries. It also has a useful subject index of all the [...]

Who should own medical knowledge
We are part of a grassroots movement of doctors and researchers who believe that medical research results should be a freely available public resource. Governments worldwide invest billions of dollars in medical research every year�the National Institutes of Health in the United States will alone spend $28bn [...]

One of the most-cited reasons against the open-access model is that authors wouldn’t pay the fees to publish their articles rather than rely on traditional methods. Open Access News has a nice post on evidence to the contrary from journals giving authors the choice.

Digital publishing and the knowledge process
The impact of Open Access initiatives could have a profound impact on scholarly knowledge distribution. The process will be both liberating and disruptive, but in the short term will undoubtedly be a hybrid situation for access to and distribution of knowledge. Liberating in that it could release a large amount [...]

E-LIS – Eprints for LIS is an open access archive for scientific or technical documents, published or unpublished, on Librarianship, Information Science and Technology, and related application activities.
dLIST, Digital Library of Information Science and Technology.

basic open access web sites is a list of websites on the main issues of the Open Access movement.

ARL 226: Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age
Lynch, Clifford A. “Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age” ARL, no. 226 (February 2003): 1-7.
One of the biggest problems in academic and research libraries is the increasing cost of professional journals. All subscription formats are going up [...]

An editorial from eCMAJ reflects on their experience with open access.
We are inclined toward the notion that science is a public good. And, fortunately, at least for the moment, we believe we can maintain our policy,8 announced in 1999, of making eCMAJ available free without barriers. This is not only a socially responsible policy, but [...]

Open Access News (Formerly: FOS News): The best, latest data on journal prices
A good review of the consequences of rapidly rising journal prices, and an excellent compendium of recent pricing data.

The staggering price of world’s best research / Bay Area universities leading charge against publishers, arguing the knowledge in academic journals must be kept within reach

Nature web focus: Access to the literature: the debate continues
An overview of the pricing issues involved in electronic publications. Odlyzko asks some questions that he doesn’t answer so I thought I would
And is it fair to shift costs of publishing from libraries to the authors themselves? Are the authors the main beneficiaries of [...]

The Directory of Open Access Journals now lists 1149 journals. Currently 316 journals are searchable on article level. 58551 articles are included
Peter Scott’s Library Blog

Open Access News (Formerly: FOS News)
One of the claims made by traditional publishers is that the peer review process might be harmed if open access business models and practices were adopted. But as this editorial in the BMJ shows, peer review is too important to be left to publishers to manage. Formal training and [...]

The Observer | Business | Black arts of the science mags

How’s this for a winning publishing formula? A university funds scientific research; the research is turned into a paper by an author, who pays a colour illustration and reprint charge – say, £1,000 – and surrenders the copyright for the privilege of publishing his findings [...]

Open Access News (Formerly: FOS News)
Nowick and Jenda summarize library responses to the crisis in scholarly publishing costs and cite what they deem most useful approaches. They point how unsustainable costs limit scientists’ access to each other’s work.
Library and scholar educational efforts, such as informing scholars about copyright alternatives and principles outlined [...]

Serials Crisis: Up and Out of the Library
There is increasing solidarity among the libraries whose budgets are in the middle of the crisis, the faculties whose members contribute the content, and the university administrators who wind up paying the bills. They are taking action to regain control over the millions they spend on content, even [...]

Open Access News (Formerly: FOS News)
In a joint statement the Reed Elsevier chairman, Morris Tabaksblat, and the chief executive, Crispin Davis, said they saw no need to change.
Haven’t we heard this song before?

Open Access News (Formerly: FOS News)
Oxford University Press is encouraged by the results of its experimental use of an OA business model for Nucleic Acids Research, a journal rated by ISI as one of the top 10 “hottest” of the decade in biology and biochemistry.

Embracing open access
The more successful open access becomes, the more irrelevant our traditional view of library budgets will be. This is an issue of institutional economics, not library economics, and we need to engage our institutional leaders at that level if we are to continue to play our crucial role in information management. Now, more [...]

Caveat Lector: Februarii 08, 2004 – Februarii 14, 2004 Archives: A thousand publishers blooming
Dorothea responds to critisisms of Open Access.

�
Price Increases Are Not the Problem
…And when we buy journals which cost a lot, we should be able to expect that "a lot" translates into a figure that is not the same thing as "perfectly outrageous."
Wonderfully sensible and well-written in a way even people not associated with libraries can understand.

Caveat Lector: Ianuarii 18, 2004 – Ianuarii 24, 2004 Archives: Journal profit models
In fact, it seems possible to me that open-access journal publishing could turn into a small but reliable revenue stream for libraries, much as it already is for scholarly societies. I think that would be superlatively excellent. Libraries need the money.

Bj�rk, B-C. (2004) Open access to scientific publications – an analysis of the barriers to change � Information Research, 9(2) paper 170 [Available at http://InformationR.net/ir/9-2/paper170.html]
Trying to get researchers to support the move towards open access, which most agree would be good for the advancement of science in principle, is like trying to get people [...]

Library Journal – TRLN to Forgo the Big Deal
In another blow to the big deal, the Triangle Research Libraries Network (TRLN) announced this week that it would not be renewing its bundled deal with Elsevier.
In December, NCSU Head of Collection Management Suzanne Weiner said that NCSU’s current Elsevier deal, negotiated through the [...]

This won’t be news to most librarians but perhaps it will be a useful reference. Dorothea Salo (markup geek and library science student) has done an excellent and entertaining job of spelling out one of the major problems faced by academic libraries today, as personified by the publishing company Elsevier.

Cornell axes Elsevier journals as prices rise
Knight, Nature 426, 217 (20 November 2003); doi:10.1038/426217a
A top US research university is set to cancel its subscriptions to several hundred scientific journals published by Elsevier in January, in response to spiralling subscription costs….
Netherlands-based Elsevier, which owns a quarter of the global market in scientific and technical [...]

The Directory of Open Access Journals is pretty much what it sounds like, a subject categorized directory of journals available for online access for free. They require that the journals to be peer-reviewed or have editorial quality control and publish research papers.