The Conclusion of Open Access Week 2010

A very encouraging letter from SPARC re the conclusion of Open Access Week 2010:

The largest, most successful International Open Access Week yet has just come to a close. With just under 900 participants in 94 countries, this year’s event was no less than three times larger than it was just a year ago. Hundreds of videos, photos, blog posts, and more were released to promote and highlight the benefits of Open Access to research and take the conversation even more deeply into the research community – and they absolutely did. . . .

More

Impressive Open Access Stats from MIT

Interesting news from MIT about its ongoing success with its year-old campus wide open access policy. In the past year there have been added "1,900 scholarly articles to the MIT Open Access articles collection in DSpace@MIT". http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/open-access-1020.html

New BC Library Guide on Copyright

BC Libraries has just released a new guide entitled Copyright and Scholarship. The primary purpose of the guide is to give guidance for resolving basic copyright questions. (There's a link to it on the right of this blog under heading: Related Library Pages). The guide includes information on:

Key Concepts

• Copyright
• Public Domain
• Fair Use
• Author Rights
• Open Access

Processes

• How to Get Copyright
• How to Get Permission
• Reserves & Classroom

Types of Content

• Electronic Theses & Dissertations
• Film & Video
• Music & Images

It is important to bear in mind that the guide is designed to provide basic, general information about copyright, and does not constitute legal advice.

October SPARC Open Access Newsletter

Peter Suber has published the October issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter. It is the 150th issue of the Newsletter. In it Suber "takes a close look at my own experience self-archiving, how I was an easier case than many other authors, how I was a harder case, and why I needed so long to move beyond a personal web site to an OA repository."

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Stanford University News recently published an update about its very heavily visited website: The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The article's author, Cynthia Haven, stresses the authoritativeness of the Encyclopedia which was launched in 1995, years before both Google and Wikipedia. Visited over 700,000 times a week, the Encyclopedia has more than 1,200 entries authored by over 1,400 individuals. Contribtions are overseen by 120 leading philosophers from all over the world while Stanford's Dept. of Philosophy is the advisory board. Thus, "[N]o one can alter text without passing through several layers of approval."

Excerpts:

It's September, and as school resumes, so does the wrangling between students and teachers across the country over the reliability of Wikipedia and other Internet sources as fodder for footnotes in research papers.

The debate has been going on for years. When philosopher Larry Sanger left Wikipedia – the project he co-founded – he said its "anti-elitism" was the root of its shortcomings. He said that because pretty much anyone could write anything, expertise was mistrusted and those committed to mayhem or propaganda could too easily dominate the medium.

But he did recommend an online alternative: the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. . . .

The Latest Version of Open Access Bibliography Available

Here is Charles Bailey's announcement about the online publication of his bibliography of material on open access and its effect on academic scholarship:

Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A
Bibliography is now available from Digital Scholarship:

http://digital-scholarship.org/tsp/transforming.htm

This bibliography presents over 1,100 selected
English-language scholarly works useful in understanding the
open access movement's efforts to provide free access to and
unfettered use of scholarly literature. The bibliography
primarily includes books and published journal articles. A
limited number of book chapters, conference papers,
dissertations and theses, magazine articles, technical
reports, and other scholarly works that are deemed to be of
exceptional interest are also included (see the "Preface"
for further details about selection criteria). The
bibliography includes links to freely available versions of
included works. Most sources have been published from
January 1, 1999 through August 1, 2010; however, a limited
number of key sources published prior to 1999 are also
included. The bibliography is available as a paperback and
an open access PDF file.

The following Digital Scholarship publications may also be
of interest:

(1) Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography, version 78

http://digital-scholarship.org/sepb/sepb.html

(2) Digital Scholarship 2009 (paperback and open access PDF
file)

http://digital-scholarship.org/sepb/annual/ds2009.htm

(3) Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography: 2008
Annual Edition (paperback, Kindle e-book, and open access
PDF file)

http://digital-scholarship.org/sepb/annual/sepb2008.htm

(4) Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography,
version 1

http://digital-scholarship.org/dcpb/dcpb.htm

Translate (oversatta, oversette, prelozit, traducir,
traduire, tradurre, traduzir, or ubersetzen):

http://digital-scholarship.org/announce/tsp.htm

The Open Access Imperative

Katharine Dunn, Dean's Editorial Fellow, Simmons College Graduate School of Library and Information Science, provides a good overview of the history, the present state, and the importance of the Open Access movement. It's entitled "The Open Access Imperative".