Below is the announcement of an excellent new Open Access Bibliography
by Charles Bailey.
http://www.escholarlypub.com/oab/keyoaconcepts.htm
It draws together most of the threads of OA and explains them clearly.
Only one quibble with this valuable new resource: It perpetuates the (in my view) spurious distinction between "free access" and "open access."
The gist of this non-distinction is that 99.9% of the uses that proponents of the distinction think one provides and the other does not in reality come with the online territory once one has made one's full-text freely accessible to one and all webwide.
Rather than reproduce all the points and counterpoints that have already been made across the years about this, here is the thread link.
"Free Access vs. Open Access" (began Aug 11 2003) http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2956.html
Note that the error of thinking that there is a distinction to be made here began with (and continues unconsciously in people's minds to be associated with) "golden" OA, i.e., publishing in an Open Access Journal. OA journals do indeed have to specify all rights explicitly; but for "green" OA (through author self-archiving of postprints of articles published in non-OA journals), there is no need to renegotiate or even specify re-use rights. They are already covered in the author's copyright agreement with his OA publisher.
The capabilities that come automatically with the territory once one has self-archived -- immediate, permanent, toll-free, full-text online access webwide -- already cover all uses that research and researchers need: on-screen readability, downloading, print-off, storage, off-line computational analysis. And every user webwide has these. So for course-packs all you need is to list the URL. Ditto for any verbatim quoting that might exceed the bounds of fair use. OA (which is a strictly online matter) is definitely not about 3rd-party republication rights. Nor is text relevantly like software (and the special needs of the Open Source community), in that the user needs to "re-use" it by modifying it. The content may be re-used and built-upon freely, but the verbatim text is the author's own, and must be attributed and left intact.
As nothing substantive hinges on this non-distinction, however, it does not diminish the value and inormativeness of Charles Bailey's excellent new resource.
An excerpt from the Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals (OAB) that provides a brief overview of OA concepts is now available in HTML-tagged format. Additional links have been added, and old links checked and updated. As part of the OAB, it is under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License.
http://www.escholarlypub.com/oab/keyoaconcepts.htm
Best Regards,
Charles
Charles W. Bailey, Jr., Assistant Dean for Digital Library
Planning and Development, University of Houston,
Library Administration, 114 University Libraries,
Houston, TX 77204-2000. E-mail: cbailey[_at_]uh.edu.
Voice: (713) 743-9804. Fax: (713) 743-9811.
DigitalKoans: http://www.escholarlypub.com/digitalkoans/
Open Access Bibliography: http://www.escholarlypub.com/oab/oab.htm
Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography:
http://info.lib.uh.edu/sepb/sepb.html
Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog: http://info.lib.uh.edu/sepb/sepw.htm
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Received on Thu Jun 23 2005 - 00:35:00 GMT
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