The First Free Research-Sharing Site, arXiv, Turns 20 With an Uncertain Future

The electronic disciplinary repository arXiv.org turns 20 years old this month. arXiv, one of the earliest and most successful efforts of the Open Access movement, is a pre-print repository serving the physical sciences, math, astronomy, computer science, quantitative biology and statistics. Boston College as a supporting institution provides financial help to arXiv.

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently published a short piece celebrating arXiv's 20th birthday. Excerpts:

. . . . ArXiv, back in 1991 and still today, focuses on physics. “The original plan was for roughly 100 full-text article submissions each year,” writes Mr. Ginsparg, who works at Cornell University. Today the site gets about 75,000 of these “preprints” every year, and it serves up about one million full-text downloads to about 400,000 users every week. It holds roughly 700,000 texts. . . .

Hirtle on HathiTrust and orphan works

In this interesting interview, Peter Hirtle, who wrote the book on Copyright and Cultural Institutions, talks about HathiTrust and the work involved in finding copyright holders of orphan works.



Available at http://youtu.be/5qp1qpw8Lus

Shieber on Guerrilla Open Access

Stuart Shieber posted a very sensible comment on the Aaron Swartz JSTOR dowloading case.
His fear is that Swartz's actions will provide more ammunition to open access opponents:

Finally, and most importantly, this kind of action is ineffective. As Peter Suber predicted in a trenchant post that we can now see as prescient, it merely has the effect of tying the legitimate, sensible, economically rational, and academically preferable approach of open access to memes of copyright violation, illegality, and naiveté. There are already sufficient attempts to inappropriately perform this kind of tying; we needn’t provide further ammunition. Unfortunate but completely predictable statements like “It is disappointing to see advocates of OA treat this person as some kind of hero.” tar those who pursue open access with the immorality and illegality that self-proclaimed guerrillas exhibit. In so doing, guerrilla OA is not only ineffective, but counterproductive.

Note -- the Suber post begins with a guerrilla manifesto attributed to Swartz -- but Suber goes on to take issue with the illegal acts advocated.

I have three basic reasons: (1) OA is already lawful and doesn't require the reform or violation of copyright law, even if it could leap forward with the right reforms. (2) OA activists will never match the publishing industry's funds for litigation. (3) One of the most persistent and harmful misunderstandings of OA is that it violates copyright law. We've come a long way in educating policy-makers out of that misunderstanding. But the Orwellian Fair Copyright in Research Works Act (a.k.a. Conyers bill) is just one recent piece of evidence that we still have a lot of educating to do and that publishers can still make a lot of hay from the misunderstandings which remain. A campaign to give the publishing lobby its first valid evidence that OA violates copyright is the last thing we need.

OpenDOAR reaches its 2000th Repository

Sherpa's OpenDOAR, a directory of academic open access repositories throughout the world, recently added its 2000th repository entry. The directory lists repositories and allows breakdown and selection by a variety of criteria - see the Find page - which can also be viewed as statistical charts.

Ad*Access -- Over 7,000 Digitized Ads, 1911-1955

Duke University's site Ad*Access is a particularly interesting digitization project. It provides access to over 7,000 U.S. and Canadian advertisements dating from 1911 to 1955. Five product categories are included - Beauty and Hygiene, Radio, Television, Transportation, and World War II propaganda. Students very frequently look for ads that they can use in their research papers. While more contemporary ones are fairly readily available from a variety of sources, older ones are often more difficult to locate. However, Ad*Access should be of major help in identifying ads from the first half of the 20th century.

The ads are free to be used for research, teaching, and private study. "For these purposes under Fair Use, you may reproduce (print, make photocopies, or download) materials from this web site without prior permission, on the condition that you provide proper attribution of the source in all copies." More information about Ad*Access and copyright may be found at http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/adaccess/about/

Visualising China: China 1850-1950, An Interactive Resource

The recently launched Visualising China project has 8,000 rare photographs of China and Chinese life from the period 1850 to 1950. The site "allows access to many previously unseen albums, envelopes and private collections and also major collections such as Historical Photographs of China, the Sir Robert Hart Collection and Joseph Needham's Photographs of Wartime China. These have many sub-collections and albums."

For more about the Visualising China project see http://visualisingchina.net/#page=about

The Royal Society has announced the launch of Open Biology, a new open access journal covering biology at the molecular and cellular level. "This selective, online Royal Society journal will publish original, high quality, peer-reviewed research in cell biology; developmental and structural biology; molecular biology; biochemistry; neuroscience; immunology; microbiology; and genetics. The criteria for acceptance will be scientific excellence, importance and originality."