2008/11/19 Jean-Claude Guédon wrote in the AMSCI OA Forum:

> Larry is right, and Stevan is right. Both routes should be followed and both
> routes should be demanded by students. Let us stop this exclusive attitude
> with regard to OA. Two roads exist. They are equally valuable. Rather than
> declaring one suprior to the other, it would be far more useful to examine
> how to make these two approaches help each other.

I agree with this.

Rainer Kuhlen has posted in INETBIB a question regarding Professor Harnad's position to the aims of the German "Urheberrechtsbündnis" ("improving copyright is slowing the OA movement"):

http://www.ub.uni-dortmund.de/listen/inetbib/msg37662.html

I have replied to this at

http://www.ub.uni-dortmund.de/listen/inetbib/msg37671.html

Here is a short summary in English:

1. It is a myth that green OA only works with a mandate.

Have a look at the NL "Cream of Science"!

2 It is a myth that mandates are legally possible in all contries.

At least in Germany it is impossible or very difficult to make mandates legally valid.

3. It is a myth that deposit with closed access is legally possible in all countries.

At least in Germany the copyright act forbidds such depositing without the consent of the holder of the exclusive rights. See

http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/5193609/

4. It is a myth that the "Request Button" works.

See my little tests

http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/5193609/
http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/5247312/

On October 11, I requested 7 titles from the U of Tasmania repository found with the following query:

http://tinyurl.com/5dbssm

On October 12 and 14 I get summa summarum 2 results, i.e. the PDFs of the requested eprints.

For me this is enough empirical evidence to say that there is until now no empirical evidence that the RCB works!

5. It is a myth to think that is all a question of embargo terms.

There are disciplines with publishers which are making case-to-case decisions and publishers which don't accept green OA. Depositing eprints closed access which cannot be used before the last dying author is 70 years dead doesn't make sense.

6. It is am myth that the primary aim of the OA movement is to make the journal literature free.

A lot of people don't share this position. For a broader definition of OA see

http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/5251764/

The Royal Society Digital Archive is easily the most
comprehensive journal archive in science and contains some of the
most significant scientific papers ever published. Covering
almost 350 years of scientific research across the disciplines it
is a priceless academic resource. The Royal Society Digital
Journal Archive, dating back to 1665 and containing approximately
52,000 articles, is available online and is FREE for a three
month period.

http://journals.royalsociety.org/home/main.mpx

http://video.google.nl/videoplay?docid=-2245387161960017497

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nationalmaritimemuseum/

http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/spec307web.pdf

Only a summary is online.

http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/news/bustech/story.html?id=e1a69f5b-3452-41dd-89a3-beea1d8a8ccd

Google expected to take over Ottawa data firm

Bert Hill, The Ottawa Citizen

Published: Friday, November 14, 2008

Google, the Internet search giant, is expected to announce today that
it has bought a vast Canadian digital database of newspaper microfilms
and other historical records from an Ottawa company.
Bob Huggins, chief executive officer of PaperOfRecord.com (POR), said
yesterday that the deal means that thousands of genealogists,
researchers and history buffs can now access information previously
locked in the dusty microfilm records of newspapers and libraries.
"We have build a vast compendium of 20 million images of newspaper
pages recording everyday life over 500 years. Much of this information
previously was not available to ordinary people." [...]

D-Lib Magazine November/December 2008
Volume 14 Number 11/12
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/november08/zuber/11zuber.html

A Study of Institutional Repository Holdings by Academic Discipline
By Peter A. Zuber

"The results from this research help to illustrate both an overall acceptance rate of institutional repositories as well as collection patterns in institutional repository content based on contributions from various academic disciplines.

H1. Institutional repositories do not yet demonstrate broad, discipline diverse contributions.

The assessment of collection diversity and coverage revealed only one institution whose content exceeded a fifty percent coverage rate. On average, of the institutions surveyed, only nineteen percent of the forty-seven disciplines were represented with at least one holding. Given that the disciplines included were only those encountered during the survey, the percentage would tend to drop even more if all known disciplines were included. The hypothesis is supported.

H2. Academic disciplines having prior history in pre-print and e-print practices contribute the greatest percentage of content.

Engineering contributed the majority of content of any discipline with thirty-six percent. Combining Physical and Social Sciences created a thirteen percent contribution; nearly twenty-three percentage points lower than Engineering. The combined disciplines ranked third nationally, two percentage points below Business, with fifteen percent. The hypothesis is not supported.

H3. The majority of institutional repositories do not provide incentives for publication, such as highlighting recent additions.

In total, eighteen institutions sponsored repositories, and fourteen, or seventy-eight percent of those provided incentives either as "Paper of the Day," "Most recent," or "Most popular." The location of incentive(s) varied depending on the site, with all BePress installations having the incentive(s) on the main page, and most DSpace installations having a single incentive on sub-pages. The hypothesis is not supported."

http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue57/waaijers-et-al/

Leo Waaijers writes about copyright, prestige and cost control in the world of open access while in two appendices Bas Savenije and Michel Wesseling compare the costs of open access publishing and subscriptions/licences for their respective institutions.

Excerpt:

Recommendation 1

Transferring the copyright in a publication has become a relic of the past; nowadays a “licence to publish” is sufficient. The author retains the copyrights. Institutions should make the use of such a licence part of their institutional policy.

Recommendation 2

The classic impact factor for a journal is not a good yardstick for the prestige of an author. Modern digital technology makes it possible to tailor the measurement system to the author. Institutions should, when assessing scientists and scholars, switch to this type of measurement and should also promote its further development.

Recommendation 3

The traditional subscription model for circulating publications is needlessly complex and expensive. Switching to Open Access, however, requires co-ordination that goes beyond the level of individual institutions. Supra-institutional organisations, for example the European University Association, should take the necessary initiative.

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/docs/Dems-letter/

Thanks to M. Schindler.

http://www.alexandriaarchive.org/blog/?p=120

http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/11/blog-notes-oa-and-greek-cultural.html

See also:

http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/5319473/

http://www.archiviststoolkit.org/downloads/index.shtml

The Archivists' Toolkit version 1.5 has been released.

Here's an excerpt from the home page that describes the software:

The Archivists' Toolkit™, or the AT, is the first open source archival data management system to provide broad, integrated support for the management of archives. It is intended for a wide range of archival repositories. The main goals of the AT are to support archival processing and production of access instruments, promote data standardization, promote efficiency, and lower training costs.

Currently, the application supports accessioning and describing archival materials; establishing names and subjects associated with archival materials, including the names of donors; managing locations for the materials; and exporting EAD finding aids, MARCXML records, and METS, MODS and Dublin Core records. Future functionality will be built to support repository user/resource use information, appraisal for archival materials, expressing and managing rights information, and interoperability with user authentication systems.