The Royal Netherlands Historical Society (Koninklijk Nederlands Historisch Genootschap, KNHG) will launch BMGN - Low Countries Historical Review as an Open Access journal on 30 March 2012. The journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle of making research freely available to the public in order to facilitate greater global exchange of knowledge.

BMGN - Low Countries Historical Review is the leading, peer reviewed academic journal for the history of the Netherlands, Belgium and their global presence. The journal accommodates all historical sub disciplines and covers every period of history since the Middle Ages. It accepts contributions in both Dutch and English. BMGN - Low Countries Historical Review is published by the KNHG and began in 1877 as a paper, subscription-based journal; readers can subscribe to the printed journal via www.knhg.nl.

The Open Access version is published in cooperation with the Utrecht University Library (Igitur publishing) at www.bmgn-lchr.nl, where the journal archive (1970-2011) can also be found. BMGN - Low Countries Historical Review has the INT1 ranking (previously known as A-status) from the European Science Foundation. From 2011 onwards the journal is indexed by Thomson Reuters for inclusion in its annual Journal Citation Reports (first impact factor to appear in 2014).

The first issue published in Open Access is a special on:

Low Countries Histories of Masculinity

http://www.h-net.org/announce/show.cgi?ID=193522

http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=subject&cpid=13&uiLanguage=en

Codrul Cosminului
ISSN: 1224032X
Subject: History
Publisher: Stefan cel Mare University of Suceava
Country: Romania
Language: Romanian, French, English
Keywords: regional history, archaeology, museology, history of international relations
Start year: 2004
Publication fee: No --- Further Information
License: [CC-BY]

The SPARC Europe Seal is an award for Open Access Journals: "To qualify for the SPARC Europe Seal a journal must use the Creative Commons By (CC-BY) license which is the most user-friendly license and corresponds to the ethos of the Budapest Open Access Initiative.

The second strand of the Seal is that journals should provide metadata for all their articles to the DOAJ, who will then make the metadata OAI-compliant. This will increase the visibility of the papers and allow OAI-harvesters to include details of the journal articles in their services."
http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=loadTempl&templ=080423

There is absolutely no evidence that the articles of "Codrul Cosminului" have a CC-BY license on the journal website:
http://atlas.usv.ro/www/codru_net/info.html

Authors have to transfer the exclusive copyright to the journal. The notice "All journal content is freely available without charge to the user or his/her institution. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles in this journal without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author." cannot be interpreted as CC-BY license. In the PDFs (if there are PDFs - older issues have dead links) there is no CC notice which should be standard (IF a free license is choosen).

http://www.novinite.com/view_news.php?id=137508

"Parts of the Bulgarian state archives will be published in Wikipedia, Martin Ivanov, head of the country's Archives State Agency, has announced.

Thus, the Bulgarian-language Wikipedia content will be enriched with various facts, data and pictures, Ivanov has explained, as cited by BGNES.

The Archives State Agency, the Bulgarian body which deals with collecting, preserving, arranging and use of historically valuable archival records, has become the country's first institution to start cooperating with Wikipedia, the official has pointed out.

The Bulgarian state archives are to become the fifth after those of the US, Great Britain, Norway and the Netherlands to officially publish data in Wikipedia."

"Michael Bullington gives a tour of his office in former Hamburger University ....."
See more: Chicago Tribune, 20.02.2012

Jeffrey Beall is a librarian living in Colorado with high merits in studying predatory Open Access publishers and journals. He is the leading expert in this area.

http://archiv.twoday.net/search?q=predatory
http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/5935318/ (first mention of Beall here in 2009)

I have his blog Scholarly Open Access http://scholarlyoa.com/ in my feeds and read his new piece on Greener Journals

http://scholarlyoa.com/2012/02/18/the-open-access-movement-reaches-a-new-low-greener-journals/

The publisher’s website boasts bright colors but uses unidiomatic English filled with grammatical errors. [...] I cannot understand why any serious researcher would pay to have their scholarly articles published by this ridiculous publisher.

As my own English isn't much better I cannot see bad English as reason to condemn an OA publisher. But browsing through the journal contents I found an article by a serious scientist, Patrick D. Biber:

http://www.gjournals.org/GJAS/GJAS%20Abstract/Abstract%202011/August/Biber.html

He has published in various reputable journals:

http://www.usm.edu/gcrl/cv/biber.patrick/publications.biber.php

What the hell motivates an US Associate professor to publish in such a bogus journal? But looking closer on his publications list it is clear that he has published the article already in 2006:

Biber, P.D. 2006. Measuring the effects of salinity stress in the red mangrove, Rhizophora mangle L., African Journal of Agricultural Research 1(1): 1-4 [pdf]

Curiously enough there isn't a link under "pdf" like the most other publikations. The African Journal of Agricultural Research is an other Open Access journal which is due its publisher Academic Journals on Beall's Black list:

http://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/

Nevertheless Biber's contribution seems serious because it was cited several times including Elsevier journals - according to Google Scholar.

It is not marked in the article nor in the frontdoor page by Academic Journals that the article is CC-BY but this is indeed the case according to the general statement:

http://www.academicjournals.org/Creative%20Common%20Attribution%20License.htm

Academic Journal (with contact adresses in Kenia and Lagos) writes on handling fees: Academic Journals is a self supporting organization and does not receive funding from any institution/government. Hence, the operation of the Journal is solely financed by the handling fees received from authors. The handling fees are required to meet operations expenses such as employees’ salaries, internet services, electricity etc. Being an Open Access Publisher, Academic Journals does not receive payment for subscription as the journals are freely accessible over the internet.

Greener Journals (with a contact adress in Lagos) has exact the same wording.
http://www.gjournals.org/Open%20Access%20Journal.html

Pure plagiarism or indication of personal connections between the two publishers?

I cannot find any evidence on the websites that it is allowed to the publisher on the ground of a copyright transfer or a contract to re-use the arcticle. (And this would only work under the premise that the publisher of Academic Journals and Greener Journals is the same.)

Now we have to examine if the CC license allows this dubious re-use of an old OA article. It is clear what the intention of Greener Journals is: By copying the PDF from Academic Journals (omitting the date of the acceptance 10, August 2006 and changing the copyright notice) the very small contents of the Greener Journal Archives are enriched by a good article of a serious US scientist.

Obviously this practice is highly misleading and unethical - but it is legal according the CC terms?

As readers of my blog entries will know for me the CC-BY license is the only appropriate license to fulfill the BBB OA definitions. Make all research results CC-BY and the data CC0!

But this only works if the terms of the license are respected. You cannot say "Hey scholars look at this case - this can happen if you make your articles CC-BY!" Thus my aim is to show that the re-use isn't legal and this sceptical argument isn't valid. CC-BY is the best way for the progress of science and arts!

First you have to ask if there is a specification on the original website defining the attribution like "By attributing this article according the CC-BY license you have to mention the name of the author, the name of the journal and the following URL". Read the legal code at
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcode

4b If You Distribute, or Publicly Perform the Work or any Adaptations or Collections, You must, unless a request has been made pursuant to Section 4(a), keep intact all copyright notices for the Work and provide, reasonable to the medium or means You are utilizing: (i) the name of the Original Author (or pseudonym, if applicable) if supplied, and/or if the Original Author and/or Licensor designate another party or parties (e.g., a sponsor institute, publishing entity, journal) for attribution ("Attribution Parties") in Licensor's copyright notice, terms of service or by other reasonable means, the name of such party or parties; (ii) the title of the Work if supplied; (iii) to the extent reasonably practicable, the URI, if any, that Licensor specifies to be associated with the Work, unless such URI does not refer to the copyright notice or licensing information for the Work; and (iv) , consistent with Section 3(b), in the case of an Adaptation, a credit identifying the use of the Work in the Adaptation (e.g., "French translation of the Work by Original Author," or "Screenplay based on original Work by Original Author"). The credit required by this Section 4 (b) may be implemented in any reasonable manner; provided, however, that in the case of a Adaptation or Collection, at a minimum such credit will appear, if a credit for all contributing authors of the Adaptation or Collection appears, then as part of these credits and in a manner at least as prominent as the credits for the other contributing authors. For the avoidance of doubt, You may only use the credit required by this Section for the purpose of attribution in the manner set out above and, by exercising Your rights under this License, You may not implicitly or explicitly assert or imply any connection with, sponsorship or endorsement by the Original Author, Licensor and/or Attribution Parties, as appropriate, of You or Your use of the Work, without the separate, express prior written permission of the Original Author, Licensor and/or Attribution Parties.

Therefore it is possible to designate the name of the author the journal title and the publisher as "attribution parties".

I am unaware of any OA CC-BY journal with such a designation. For me it is ethical to mirror a CC-BY article with the standard bibliographic citation like Biber, P.D. 2006. Measuring the effects of salinity stress in the red mangrove, Rhizophora mangle L., African Journal of Agricultural Research 1(1): 1-4 adding the source URL (or DOI - please keep in mind that both publishers doesn't offer DOIs!). If I have some critical comments on Biber's work I can reproduce the whole article for reader's comfort. This is the sense of CC-BY.

As there is no such designation on the Academic journals website there is no license violation by Greener Journals in this regard.

But there are two other violations of the license terms:

1. There is no mentioning of the CC-license in the PDF nor on the abstract page by Greener Journals.

The CC-BY legal code reads: You may Distribute or Publicly Perform the Work only under the terms of this License. You must include a copy of, or the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) for, this License with every copy of the Work You Distribute or Publicly Perform.

2. The original copyright notices are not kept ("keep intact all copyright notices for the Work", quoted above). For German law see also § 95c UrhG (German Copyright Act).

I cannot image that Professor Biber has made an individual contract with the Lagos company or persons behind Greener Journals allowing them to re-use its 2006 article. Thus one has to conclude that the fraudulent re-use by Greener Journals clearly violates the CC-BY license terms. Violating the CC terms is violation of copyright. It is illegal and this clearly confirms Beall's judgement on this bogus OA publisher.

------------

CC-BY (URL quoted above). You are free to distribute this blog entry (without the picture below), to build upon or adapt it (especially by meliorating its English) if you distribute it with the following Copyright notice: "(c) Klaus Graf: Greener Journals. In: Archivalia, 2012, Februar 19, http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/64979561/" And don't forget to mention the license URI!

Source: Greener Journals website

"Perhaps you all have read about the following story that happened in Guatemala. During the 36-year civil war that ended in 1996, thousands and thousands of people had been executed, and made to disappear by the national secret police. For years, human rights advocates had tried to nail down those people who are responsible for all these atrocities, but they couldn’t do anything because of the absence of concrete evidence. And in 2005, by accident, a huge amount of police records and archives testifying to those crimes were discovered in a run-down factory that had actually been used as a storeroom for ammunition for the secret police. And because of this discovery, they were able to make some arrests and even had some perpetrators brought to court, some of whom actually went to jail.

This is the power of archives. Without archives, much of human rights work cannot happen. When we are talking about archives, we mean those records that were created by an organization, or even by an individual, as a result of official business. The important thing is that records created in such a way have to be kept and man- aged professionally, as evidence of the business activities concerned. As such, records are “evidence” of the whole business process; they are the basis for accountability.

Archivists usually make a distinction between “records” and “archives.” Records refer to those which are still in active use by an organization. But when records have completed their administrative function, and if they have been appraised by an archivist to possess historical value, they will then be sent to the organization’s archives for permanent retention. So, there are “records” and there are “archives.”

In Hong Kong, there is no archives law! ...."
Link

Nupepa Type Scripting Project from R3IMAGE on Vimeo.

R3 had the wonderful opportunity to work on this project to create this call for support in completing a searchable archive for thousands of pages of Hawaiian newspapers.

From: Catherine Eagleton
To: MONEY-MUSEUMS@JISCMAIL.AC.UK

Dear all,
Many of you will already have heard the sad news about budget cuts and job losses at the Geldmuseum Utrecht, in the Netherlands. This museum has had financial difficulties since its creation in 2004 from a merger of the Royal Coin Cabinet, the Dutch Mint Museum, and the collection of the Dutch Central Bank, most recently in 2008 resulting in 6 collections management staff losing their jobs. Now, despite the efforts of all who work there, and the new director (who was faced with this problem as soon as she arrived in 2009), the financial challenges remain.
The result of this is that a reorganization and refocusing of the museum is in progress. The main activity of the museum will now be financial education, and while there is still an internationally-important collection there, it will now be looked after by just two curators, who will focus mostly on doing exhibitions. The collections- and research-related activity will be dramatically scaled back, meaning that nine of our colleagues in the Collections and Research Department at Geldmuseum Urecht will lose their jobs, and while there are plans to keep the library open for limited hours each week, this will be run by volunteers.
I’m sorry to have to bring this sad news to you all – my thoughts are with our colleagues in Utrecht.
Catherine Eagleton
Dr. Catherine Eagleton
The British Museum
Curator of Modern Money
Great Russel Street
WC 1B 3 DG London

"Between 1933 and 1945, the Nazi German regime promoted racial health policies that sought to eliminate all sources of biological corruption to its dominant “Aryan” race. Among the groups persecuted as threats to the national health were Germany’s homosexual men. Believing them to be carriers of a “degeneracy” that weakened society and hindered population growth, the Nazi state arrested and incarcerated in prisons and concentration camps tens of thousands of German men as a means of terrorizing them into social conformity.
Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals 1933–1945 examines the Nazi regime’s attempt to eradicate homosexuality, which left thousands dead and shattered the lives of many more."
Link