Gideon Burton, The Coming Change in Humanities Publishing (6): Open Access, Gideon Burton’s Blog, December 12, 2008.  Excerpt:

…Open Access means that a digital work is available for free and without those licensing or copyright restrictions that would limit its reuse. If you are unfamiliar with Open Access, there are many sources for getting up to speed–especially Peter Suber’s Open Access site.  Or see my detailed PowerPoint on Open Access (via Slideshare)….

Conventional publishing is a restricted-access paradigm based on the limits of print publishing. To recoup the costs of print publishing, a payment by the interested reader (to a publisher for a book or to a journal for a subscription) has been required to get to the information. Open Access eliminates the cost for access altogether and shifts the costs for preparing publications from the point of distribution to the point of production.

So here’s how it works. Instead of individuals or institutions forking out $25 for an article or up to $20,000/year for a journal subscription (not kidding), readers pay nothing to read the publication in question. Instead, the individual author (or his/her granting agency or host institution) pays an Open Access fee in order to get his/her work published. The fee could be $300 or $3000 (depending on the discipline, subventions, etc.)….[PS:  Most of the time it is zero, since the majority of OA journals charge no fees.]

There are two ways to publish your work as Open Access. The first is to publish in a traditional journal that offers authors the opportunity to publish their work as Open Access (for a fee)….The second way to publish humanities scholarship as Open Access is to submit work directly to an Open Access journal….In the next two posts I will look at the role of repositories as a publishing outlet (not simply an archive)….

Also see Stevan Harnad’s comments:

(1) Two Kinds of OA: Gratis and Libre: There are two kinds of Open Access (OA) — "gratis" (free online access) and "libre" (free online access plus certain re-use rights) — but Gideon Burton seems to be writing about OA as if there were only one kind ("libre"). (See: "Open Access: ‘Gratis’ and ‘Libre’")

The gratis/libre distinction matters a lot, because it is critical to the strategy for successfully achieving OA (of either kind) at all. There is still very little OA today, but most of what OA there is is gratis, not libre. The fastest and surest way to achieve 100% OA is for universities and funders to mandate OA, and they are at last beginning to do so. But universities and funders can (and hence should) only mandate gratis OA, not libre OA….

(2) Two Ways to Reach 100% OA: The Golden Road and the Green Road: There are two roads to 100% OA, the "golden road" of authors publishing in OA journals and the "green road" of authors publishing in conventional journals but also self-archiving their articles in their own Institutional Repositories (IRs) to make them OA….

The green/gold distinction matters even more than the gratis/libre distinction, because Green OA can be mandated by universities and funders, whereas gold OA cannot. Moreover, most journals already have a green (63%) or pale-green (32%) policy on author OA self-archiving, whereas only about 15% of journals are gold OA journals, and the rest cannot be mandated by universities and funders to convert….

PS:  Also see my own discussion of the gratis/libre distinction and the differences between the gratis/libre and green/gold distinctions.

Gideon Burton, The Coming Change in Humanities Publishing (6): Open Access, Gideon Burton’s Blog, December 12, 2008.  Excerpt:

…Open Access means that a digital work is available for free and without those licensing or copyright restrictions that would limit its reuse. If you are unfamiliar with Open Access, there are many sources for getting up to speed–especially Peter Suber’s Open Access site.  Or see my detailed PowerPoint on Open Access (via Slideshare)….

Conventional publishing is a restricted-access paradigm based on the limits of print publishing. To recoup the costs of print publishing, a payment by the interested reader (to a publisher for a book or to a journal for a subscription) has been required to get to the information. Open Access eliminates the cost for access altogether and shifts the costs for preparing publications from the point of distribution to the point of production.

So here’s how it works. Instead of individuals or institutions forking out $25 for an article or up to $20,000/year for a journal subscription (not kidding), readers pay nothing to read the publication in question. Instead, the individual author (or his/her granting agency or host institution) pays an Open Access fee in order to get his/her work published. The fee could be $300 or $3000 (depending on the discipline, subventions, etc.)….[PS:  Most of the time it is zero, since the majority of OA journals charge no fees.]

There are two ways to publish your work as Open Access. The first is to publish in a traditional journal that offers authors the opportunity to publish their work as Open Access (for a fee)….The second way to publish humanities scholarship as Open Access is to submit work directly to an Open Access journal….In the next two posts I will look at the role of repositories as a publishing outlet (not simply an archive)….

Also see Stevan Harnad’s comments:

(1) Two Kinds of OA: Gratis and Libre: There are two kinds of Open Access (OA) — "gratis" (free online access) and "libre" (free online access plus certain re-use rights) — but Gideon Burton seems to be writing about OA as if there were only one kind ("libre"). (See: "Open Access: ‘Gratis’ and ‘Libre’")

The gratis/libre distinction matters a lot, because it is critical to the strategy for successfully achieving OA (of either kind) at all. There is still very little OA today, but most of what OA there is is gratis, not libre. The fastest and surest way to achieve 100% OA is for universities and funders to mandate OA, and they are at last beginning to do so. But universities and funders can (and hence should) only mandate gratis OA, not libre OA….

(2) Two Ways to Reach 100% OA: The Golden Road and the Green Road: There are two roads to 100% OA, the "golden road" of authors publishing in OA journals and the "green road" of authors publishing in conventional journals but also self-archiving their articles in their own Institutional Repositories (IRs) to make them OA….

The green/gold distinction matters even more than the gratis/libre distinction, because Green OA can be mandated by universities and funders, whereas gold OA cannot. Moreover, most journals already have a green (63%) or pale-green (32%) policy on author OA self-archiving, whereas only about 15% of journals are gold OA journals, and the rest cannot be mandated by universities and funders to convert….

PS:  Also see my own discussion of the gratis/libre distinction and the differences between the gratis/libre and green/gold distinctions.

Kim Leeder, Social networking with a brain: a critical review of academic sites, In the Library with the Lead Pipe, December 10, 2008. Includes a discussion of the “networking-repository hybrid model”. (Thanks to Marlène Delhaye.)

See also:

• Past posts on BibApp, Labmeeting, and Pronetos (reviewed here)
• Past posts on social networking sites
• Overview of some research sharing tools

Kim Leeder, Social networking with a brain: a critical review of academic sites, In the Library with the Lead Pipe, December 10, 2008. Includes a discussion of the “networking-repository hybrid model”. (Thanks to Marlène Delhaye.)

See also:

• Past posts on BibApp, Labmeeting, and Pronetos (reviewed here)
• Past posts on social networking sites
• Overview of some research sharing tools

The Fall 2008 issue of Access, the National Biological Information Infrastructure newsletter, is now online. See these articles:

• “NBII Helps DoD Keep the Environment Healthy” (p. 1), on the U.S. Department of Defense Threatened and Endangered Species Document Repository
• “NBII Moving Toward Web 2.0 Technologies to Improve Access to Biological Content” (p. 3)
• “Tricolored Blackbird Portal Provides Data Entry, Access, and Sharing Capabilities” (p. 4), on the Tricolored Blackbird Portal
• “NBII-sponsored E-journal Emerges as a Leading Voice in Sustainability Science” (p. 6), on Sustainability: Science, Practice, & Policy

See also our past posts on Sustainability or on NBII.

Globalizing quake information, Nature Geoscience, December 2008.  The journal has made this editorial TA at its own site, but authorized an OA copy at the site of the Global Earthquake Model.  Excerpt from the latter:

The Global Earthquake Model is an open-source initiative aimed at creating the definitive instrument for the calculation and communication of earthquake risks. It is a promising attempt to pool regional knowledge to create one reliable global resource and to facilitate the communication of the results to policy makers and the public.

The Global Earthquake Model is an initiative of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), set to launch in early 2009. But work on a technology demonstrator version, GEM₁, has already begun. When fully functional, it will be possible to calculate the probability that an earthquake will strike a particular region during a user-specified timeframe, and also the expected ground motion. This capability will be founded on an extensive database of geological and geophysical data, such as the locations of active faults, historical earthquakes, and the nature of soils. The model will be constantly refined as new information becomes available and the estimation of probabilities will be dynamic rather than static.

When combined with data on population density and the quality of buildings, the system will allow the estimation of the likely damage to life and property….

Rich geological and geophysical data sets are available for some regions of the world such as the United States, but the same is not true for less wealthy and developed regions….Encouraging the involvement of governments of developing nations in the Global Earthquake Model project may be one way of creating greater awareness and a culture of preparedness….

The project is still in its infancy, and it is difficult to gauge its likely impact, let alone evaluate it critically. But it seems to be based on sound foundations: making the tools freely accessible is just, and seeking genuine cooperation of various stakeholders is democratic. The success of the Global Earthquake Model is in everyone’s interest; the whole-hearted support of scientists, governments, and the private sector should help it to live up to its promise.

Comment.  GEM seems to depend on the openness of data, not just the accuracy and comprehensiveness of data.  If the input data are not open, but the model produces open outputs, then specialists could infer the broad contours of the input data.  Hence, regions unwilling to make their data public would likely be unwilling to participate in the project even with closed data.  If so, then, this is not just a call to governments to support the project with relevant data, but to support it with open data. 

H.M., a widely-studied patient on the topic of amnesia and memory, passed away in December 2008 and donated his brain to further study. The Brain Observatory at the University of California, San Diego will lead the research. Jacopo Annese, the Observatory’s director, has announced that it will take an open approach to the research, including a blog for the project and Webcasts of the procedures. See the story from Science Friday. (Thanks to Bora Zivkovic.)

Pablo Lara and Antonia Ferrer, Luis Collado, responsable de Búsqueda de Libros de Google, El profesional de la información, July-August 2008; self-archived December 21, 2008. English abstract:

Luis Collado answers some questions about the program Google Book Search. He describes what it is and what it is not. His words reveal Google’s philosophy of universal access to information.

María Jesús del Olmo García, Stuart Shieber cuenta, desde Harvard, su punto de vista sobre Open Access y el sistema de publicación académica, SEDICblog, December 23, 2008. Blog notes on Jornadas sobre Open Acces y E-prints (Madrid, December 10-12, 2008).

Gavin Baker, Opening research proposals; thoughts on virtual collaboration, A Journal of Insignificant Inquiry, December 23, 2008.

… Opening research proposals: This seems to be an aspect of research which is relatively secretive. Few funding bodies seem to post the proposals for projects they fund, let alone proposals they rejected. But wouldn’t researchers (and students) benefit from seeing the methods proposed by other researchers? Wouldn’t the full details of a project, not just a summary, improve current awareness and reduce unnecessary duplication? Wouldn’t better access to proposals increase the transparency both of funders (so anyone can see the details of what was funded as well as what was turned down) and of researchers (so anyone can compare the methodology of the published results to the methodology proposed earlier)? There may be some cases where researchers want to keep their methodology secret until they’re done working on it, but those should be the exception rather than the rule. We can start working on the low-hanging fruit now, while thinking about how to deal with the cases where researchers don’t want disclosure: there’s no reason in principle that we shouldn’t campaign for open access to research proposals alongside research data and published results. …

Christian Zimmermann, The worldwide reach of RePEc, The RePEc Blog, December 26, 2008.

… [RePEc‘s] 18,500 [authors] are distributed over 118 countries (and all US states). Then, the 960+ RePEc archives, which each contribute bibliographic data to the project, are dispersed in 64 countries. But some of those archives collect data from several institutions. Thus, we actually have publications from 70 countries (and all but five US states …) …

India’s National Folklore Support Centre has opened a portal of OA Indian folklore journals, apparently launched in 2008. (Thanks to Jason Baird Jackson.) The portal hosts 14 OA journals, several of them new:

• Crossovers: Journal of Folklore, Literature, and Culture Studies (forthcoming)
• Folklore and Folkloristics (first issue in 2008)
• Journal of Ethnomusicology (forthcoming)
• Journal of Theatre and Drama (forthcoming)
• Journal of Tribal Studies (forthcoming)
• Journal of the Folklore Research Department (first issue in 2008)
• Lokaratna (first issue in 2008)
• Mukt-Saad (first issue in July 2008)
• Namma Janapadaru (forthcoming)
• NavaSameeksha (forthcoming)
• Panuval – Journal of Tamil Studies (first issue in 2008)

India’s National Folklore Support Centre has opened a portal of OA Indian folklore journals, apparently launched in 2008. (Thanks to Jason Baird Jackson.) The portal hosts 14 OA journals, several of them new:

• Crossovers: Journal of Folklore, Literature, and Culture Studies (forthcoming)
• Folklore and Folkloristics (first issue in 2008)
• Journal of Ethnomusicology (forthcoming)
• Journal of Theatre and Drama (forthcoming)
• Journal of Tribal Studies (forthcoming)
• Journal of the Folklore Research Department (first issue in 2008)
• Lokaratna (first issue in 2008)
• <cite>Mukt-Saad (first issue in July 2008)
• Namma Janapadaru (forthcoming)
• NavaSameeksha (forthcoming)
• Panuval – Journal of Tamil Studies (first issue in 2008)

Jurisdoctoria is a new OA journal published by the schools of comparative law and public & fiscal law at Université Paris I – Panthéon-Sorbonne. The inaugural issue was released in October 2008. The journal is dedicated to work by young researchers. The journal is published in French with English abstracts. Jurisdoctoria will publish two issues a year, each themed. (Thanks to Georges-Hubert Delporte.)

The UK Book Academy is discovering broken links to Google-scanned books.  Is Google moving them?  Taking them offline?  (Thanks to Klaus Graf.)