Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Domains

Domain: openarchives.org

Stories and comments across the archive that link to openarchives.org.

Comments · 9

  1. More OA info by Seiruu · · Score: 1 · on Libraries Defend Open Access
    For a very brief overview of Open Access & Commercial Publishers:

    http://listserver.sigmaxi.org/sc/wa.exe?A2=ind07&L =american-scientist-open-access-forum&D=1&O=D&F=l& S=&P=87619

    If I have to summarize that page (copy/paste), it'd basically go like this:

    (1) PEER-REVIEWED JOURNAL-ARTICLE AUTHORS GIVE JOURNALS THEIR ARTICLES FOR FREE: NO ROYALTIES.

    The authors' research and writings are funded by government research grants and/or by salaries from their employers (mostly universities).

    (2) PEERS REVIEW FOR FREE.

    The peers' reviewing work and time are funded by salaries from their employers (mostly universities).

    (3) PUBLISHER REVENUES FROM INSTITUTIONAL SUBSCRIPTIONS ARE CURRENTLY PAYING THE FULL COST OF MANAGING THE PEER REVIEW, SEVERAL TIMES OVER.

    That is the status quo today: The costs of managing peer review are covered, many times over, by selling -- mostly to the authors' institutions -- paper and online access to the articles donated for free by the authors, with the peer review donated for free by the peers.

    (4) IF INSTITUTIONAL SUBSCRIPTIONS ARE EVER CANCELED, PEER REVIEW MANAGEMENT COSTS WILL BE PAID OUT OF THE INSTITUTIONAL SUBSCRIPTION CANCELLATION SAVINGS.

    If and when institutional subscriptions were ever canceled unsustainably as a consequence of Green OA, the cost of peer review could easily be paid for directly by institutions, on behalf of their employees, per paper submitted, out of just a fraction of the very same funds they have saved from their institutional subscription cancellations. All access and archiving would then be provided by the network of institutional OA repositories instead of the publisher, who would only provide the peer review. This is called "OA publishing" or "Gold OA." With Gold OA still somewhat being farfetched, the OA movement is currently striving for Green OA, which means that the commercial publishers do their normal routine, but allow the authors to deposit their peer reviewed and for publication accepted paper in their institutional repository immediately after its publication, where the institutional repository in question will follow certain protocols ( e.g. Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/openarchivesprotoc ol.html#Introduction) so the contents will be made searchable in various search engines (like google scholar, and others).
  2. Re:The times they are a changin' by Grahame · · Score: 1 · on Science Journal Publishers Wary of Free Information

    It is sad to say that academics are so hopelessly individual they are highly unlikely to be able to join together to beat the publishers just yet! Not really true. See: http://www.openarchives.org/ Also. ArXiv.org, http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/ and others.
  3. TFA by wfberg · · Score: 1 · on Why Is Data Mining Still A Frontier?

    What about that TFA? Some one converted a stack of indexcards to a relational database? And this warrants a post on regdeveloper AND slashdot, exactly why?
    Like there aren't things to write about like the Open Archives Initiative Protocol.. Geez.

  4. Free Access / Open Source Journal Management by P!Alexander · · Score: 3, Informative · on Free/Open-Access Academic Journals Growing

    I've been involved with an undergraduate journal at California State University, Monterey Bay for the past couple of years. Just this year we opted to go with an open source journal management system developed and supported by the Public Knowledge Project Open Journal Systems at the University of British Columbia. We're quite happy with it, both from a technical standpoint and the mission of the project. ePrints is another project working on similar issues.

    Hopefully we will see more open access (without requiring payment from authors OR readers!) as libraries and other institutions start to use these great open source tools. It makes management and online publication/archiving really painless. There's even a distributed backup system in place and a group running archiving standards.

    As a member of the American Anthropological Association I understand that the journals they publish are supported through subscriber costs which far outweigh the cost of publication. The remaining profit goes to funding the annual conference, administration costs for the association, etc. They have recently made all of the American Anthropologist journals available to members online, a pretty massive project I'm sure.

  5. Re:Not full courseware by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0 · on Harvard Open Source Courseware

    I'll see your karma whoring, and raise you, umm... several:
    dotLRN, built on the OpenACS toolkit.
    The Future Learning Environment, built on Zope.
    The Open Archives Initiative is also interesting for academic information archival projects. Also eprints.org for GPL software for creating archives.

    A lot of so-called "distance learning" projects focus their efforts on multimedia transmission - so that a picture of a person talking on screen can be transmitted... big whoop. The projects listed above focus on discussion and content sharing, which is where I think online education will really thrive.

  6. EPrints gives you OAI... by Manic+Miner · · Score: 3 · on Software for Online Peer-Review Journals?

    Darn, where did my moderation points go? :(

    Another advantage to using eprints is that it uses the OAI protocol to provide an external XML based interface to your site. This allows central "harvesters" to harvest the meta-data from your site and allow ease of centralised access and searching of multilpe e-print archives.

    For more information on OAI... see the FAQ

  7. eprints / Open Archives Initiative by krp · · Score: 1 · on Research Publications Web Page?
    There's some work going on within our department (which I'm not involved in, so don't blame me if I don't get it all right ;) which looks pretty useful/interesting.

    Firstly the eprints.org author/institution self-archiving software: eprints.org
    It's been designed "to be as flexible and adaptable as possible so that universities can adopt and configure it with minimal effort for all disciplines".
    An exapmple of its use is at the: Cognitive Sciences eprint Archive

    It's also got other noble principles behind it:"The generic version of eprints is fully interoperable with all other OAI-Compliant Open Archives. This means that it no longer matters where papers are archived; the papers in all registered OAI-compliant Archives can be harvested using the OAI protocol into one global "virtual archive" by Open Archives Service Providers".
    See the Open Archives Initiative for more info.

    Oh, and our department's publication database isn't bad either.

  8. Misconceptions in article by bhenley · · Score: 1 · on Scientists Gearing Up to Publish Unrestricted Journals

    The article itself and the write-up are both wrong to say that "only Genome Biology and PubMed Central" have accepted the terms of the PLOS.

    • PubMed Central is a repository of papers that are published in journals. It's an NIH (US government) initiative to ensure that electronic science articles are archived permanently. It's not a journal in its own right so it doesn't really make sense to talk about it accepting their terms.
    • Genome Biology is one of many journals published under the BioMed Central banner which makes primary research articles freely available online. Copyright is retained by the author. Articles are indexed in PubMed, archived in PubMed Central and metadata is harvestable through the Open Archives Initiative Protocol. There are over 40 BMC journals.

    Of course, the costs of processing text and organising peer review need to be covered somehow. BMC plan to charge for non-primary content (e.g. review articles) and we are considering introducing a fee for publication (which would be waived for scientists with limited funds). The cost to the biomedical community of funding research communication by this type of fee would be an order of magnitude less than the current model of charging for access to published work.

    The big advantage of making science articles open-access is that indexing is made a lot easier. A biological version of ResearchIndex (aka citeseer) would become possible. Also, you can find open-access research using Google and you don't need to be in an institution with expensive subscriptions to journals to read it.

  9. Open Archive by Bilby · · Score: 1 · on 95 (thousand) Theses (for sale)

    Hi!

    The Open Archive initiative might be useful here. It is intended to escape the so-called "tyranny" of the published journals, but it might serve to undermine such groups. Basically, you self-archive your thesis/papers, using the meta tag system covered in the Santa Fe convention, and then make them available for free online. If you have copyright problems, the answer I was given was to archive the penultimate version. Further info is at http://www.openarchives.org/

    I suspect that these organisations would die if they couldn't sell the papers, so by providing them free in a format which makes them easy to find we should be able to cut their legs out from under them. I'm not a great fan of the initiative as it stands, but this might be an actual use for it.