Wisely 's Bookmarks tagged creative-commons →  View Popular

Framing the Issue: Open Access

http://www.arl.org/scomm/open_access/framing.html

This resource guide from the Association of Research Libraries looks at open access from a library point of view, examining the economics of scholarly publishing and US copyright law trends in addition to providing a general open access overview. It includes links to key open access resources.

Directory of Mathematics Preprint and e-Print Servers

http://www.ams.org/global-preprints/index.html

This directory from the American Mathematical Society covers e-print servers in the United States as well as in countries such as Austria, Canada, France, Germany, and Russia. The servers are listed in four categories: (1) umbrella servers, which cover all areas of Mathematics; (2) special subject servers; (3) Mathematics department and institute servers; and (4) "retired" servers that are no longer active. As noted on its front page, the directory provides "mathematicians with a tool to find any of these servers in order to browse the articles posted on them and, in many cases, to post an article to the server itself." The servers from non-English-speaking countries usually offer English interfaces.

Directory of Open Access Repositories

http://www.opendoar.org/

A project of the University of Nottingham and the University of Lund, this directory is currently being developed. When completed, it will "provide a comprehensive and authoritative list of institutional and subject-based repositories, as well as archives set up by funding agencies. . . . Users of the service will be able to analyse repositories by location, type, the material they hold and other measures."

E-print Network, U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)

http://www.osti.gov/eprints/

This directory provides access to over 16,000 e-print archives (it also includes some preprints submitted directly to the DOE). It covers subject areas ranging from chemistry, biology, engineering, information technologies, materials science, physics, and other disciplines relevant to the DOE. A sophisticated search engine allows users to search multiple e-print repositories simultaneously. E-Print repositories and e-prints can also be browsed by discipline. Other features of the Web site include a concise description of the significance of e-prints, an international directory of relevant scientific societies, and the provision of a subject-specific alert service.

Institutional Archives Registry

http://archives.eprints.org/

This directory from Eprints.org provides access to over 400 academic department (or other academic unit) archives, disciplinary archives, institutional repositories, and other digital archives around the globe. Each entry provides some description of an archive, including what software was used to create it, its country of origin, the nature of publications archived, and the percentage of the publications that are freely accessible. There is also a chart that shows the change in deposited publications in the archive over time. At the right end of the entry is a thumbnail image of the archive's front page. Archives that were built with GNU EPrints are highlighted in pale blue. All entries are searchable by keyword and browseable by archive name, country of origin, archive type, and software. Suggestions can be made to the editor for an archive to be listed on the Registry. This directory is an especially handy tool for identifying institutional repositories and for monitoring the growth of individual archives and repositories.

Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)

http://www.doaj.org/

The Directory of Open Access Journals, which is maintained by Lund University Libraries, is the most important directory of open access journals, and it currently contains over 1,500 journals. The aim of the DOAJ is to "increase the visibility and ease of use of open access scientific and scholarly journals thereby promoting their increased usage and impact." It "aims to be comprehensive and cover all open access scientific and scholarly journals that use a quality control system to guarantee the content." It has detailed selection criteria (http://www.doaj.org/articles/questions#selectioncriteria). It should be noted that these criteria do not require the journals to be under a Creative Commons Attribution (or similar) license, which would ensure that they meet the criteria set forth by the major definitions of open access. The journals in DOAJ are grouped and browseable by discipline. The contents of some journals are searchable and accessible via this Web site.

Free Full Text

http://www.freefulltext.com/

This directory "provides direct links to over 7,000 scholarly periodicals which allow some or all of their online content to be viewed by ANYONE with Internet access for free (though some may require free registration)." Although the only access to the included journals is by browsing an A-Z title list, the depth of coverage of this directory is hard to beat, and users of the Google toolbar (or similar search engine toolbars) can use it to search this site for desired journals.

HighWire Press: Free Online Full-text Articles

http://www.highwire.org/lists/freeart.dtl

Pioneering e-publisher HighWire Press, which is a division of the Stanford University Libraries, offers this alphabetical directory of scientific and medical journals that it publishes that offer full or partial free access to their contents. Over 840,000 freely available articles are included in this directory.

Guide to Open Content Licenses

http://pzwart.wdka.hro.nl/mdr/research/lliang/open_content_guide

This guide by Lawrence Liang is an introduction to open content licensing, which is "a paradigm that is rapidly emerging as an important alternative to the existing model of copyright." It defines and characterizes the open content license, and presents a comparative analysis of different open content licenses. At the end of the guide are a bibliography and a glossary.

Publisher Copyright Policies & Self-Archiving

http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.php

This directory from SHERPA provides access to publishers' policies about self-archiving of preprints and postprints. Its contents are searchable and browseable. There are also links to publishers' copyright policies if they are posted on the Internet. Publisher policies are color coded according to what type of archiving is allowed (e.g., green means the author can archive both the preprint and postprint). Since publisher policies vary considerably and it can be difficult to determine what they are, this Web site is an invaluable resource for scholars and institutional repository managers; however, it does have a disclaimer that: "All information is correct to the best of our knowledge but should not be relied upon for legal advice." A related Web site by Stevan Harnad, Self-Archiving Policy by Journal (http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php) which is based on the SHERPA data, provides further details, including summary statistics

Disciplinary Archives

arXiv

http://arxiv.org/

Established in 1991 by Paul Ginsparg, arXiv is one of the oldest and most influential disciplinary archives. It contains e-prints in the fields of computer science, physics, mathematics, non-linear science, and quantitative biology. Partially supported by the National Science Foundation, arXiv is now at Cornell University after many years at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The e-prints are categorized by subfield. The reader can view new and recent e-prints in the subfields and also search the contents of the whole archive.

Cogprints

http://cogprints.org/

Supported by the Department of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton and edited by Stevan Harnad, Cogprints provides access to e-prints in fields that deal with cognitive psychology, such as biology, computer science, linguistics, philosophy, psychology, and related disciplines.

DLIST

http://dlist.sir.arizona.edu/

Run by the School of Information Resources and Library Science and the Arizona Health Sciences Library (both at the University of Arizona), DLIST (Digital Library of Information Science and Technology) provides access to e-prints in the areas of library and information science and information technology.

E-LIS: E-prints in Library and Information Science

http://eprints.rclis.org/

Administered by Research in Computing, Library and Information Science (which also offers Documents in Information Science), E-LIS provides access to over 2,300 library and information science e-prints. The e-prints are browseable and searchable. Authors can register and then deposit articles. They can also choose to receive alerts for new items via e-mail or an RSS feed.

RePEc

http://repec.org/

RePEc (Research Papers in Economics) is a database, supported by volunteers in 44 countries, that provides access to bibliographic information about economics articles, books and book chapters, working papers, and software as well as other types of information. It covers over 300,000 items, over 200,000 of which are available on the Internet.

Guide to the Open Access Movement

http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/guide.htm

This Web page by Peter Suber provides a lengthy "guide to the terminology, acronyms, initiatives, standards, technologies, and players in the open-access or free online scholarship (FOS) movement." Although its final revision was in the summer of 2004, it remains a very useful and unique reference tool.

Timeline of the Open Access Movement

http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/timeline.htm

In this fascinating Web page, Peter Suber traces the roots of open access back to the 1960s.

What You Can Do to Promote Open Access

http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/do.htm

In this Web page, Peter Suber provides detailed suggestions for what citizens, foundations, governments, journals and publishers, learned societies, and universities (including the different types of members of the academic community, such as faculty) can do to promote and foster open access.

Alliance for Taxpayer Access

http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/

The Alliance for Taxpayer Access is "a diverse and growing alliance of organizations representing taxpayers, patients, physicians, researchers, and institutions that support open public access to taxpayer-funded research." The initial focus of ATA is on ensuring that scholarly articles resulting from NIH-funded research are freely available.

Open Access Working Group

http://www.arl.org/sparc/oa/oawg.html

Started by SPARC in 2003, the Open Access Working Group "seeks to build broad-based recognition that the economic and societal benefits of scientific and scholarly research investments are maximized through open access to the results of that research," and it "aims to bring about changes within stakeholder institutions enabling viable open access models to be widely and successfully implemented and accepted." Members include the Creative Commons, the Open Society Institute, Public Knowledge, the Public Library of Science, SPARC, and several major library associations.

Open Archives Initiative (OAI)

http://www.openarchives.org/

The Open Archives Initiative "develops and promotes interoperability standards that aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content." Its Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) is extremely important. In addition to detailed information about OAI-PMH, the Web site offers an OAI-PMH validation tool, links to related software, mailing lists, current news, and other resources.

SHERPA

http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/

The SHERPA (Securing a Hybrid Environment for Research Preservation and Access) project, based at the University of Nottingham, aims to establish institutional open access e-print repositories in partner UK institutions and investigates issues pertinent to the development and use of those repositories. The Web site offers advice on self-archiving, helps the viewer find open access archives, and provides links to relevant initiatives and organizations.

Thesis Alive!

http://www.thesesalive.ac.uk/

The Thesis Alive project's goals were to "i) Develop a digital thesis submission system for use by interested universities, ii) Develop an international standards compliant digital infrastructure which enables e-theses to be published online, iii) Develop and support a generic metadata format capable of delivering metadata to a number of relevant metadata repositories for UK thesis information, iv) Test the value of a national support service for etheses creation and management in the UK, v) Work with other e-theses developments internationally, and in particular to assist the research aims of other e-theses projects funded within the JISC FAIR Programme, and vi) Produce a 'checklist approach' for universities to use as they develop e-theses capability." A key outcome of the project was the development of the Tapir plug-in for DSpace (http://sourceforge.net/projects/tapir-eul), which enhances DSpace's ability to provide ETD support.

Public Library of Science (PLoS)

http://www.publiclibraryofscience.org/

PLoS is "a nonprofit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a public resource." Its goals are to "open the doors to the world's library of scientific knowledge," to "facilitate research, informed medical practice, and education," and to "enable scientists, librarians, publishers, and entrepreneurs to develop innovative ways to explore and use the world's treasury of scientific ideas and discoveries." PLoS currently publishes two highly regarded journals—PLoS Biology (October 2003)and PLoS Medicine (October 2004)—with three more planned for release in 2005. PLoS has publication charges similar to BioMed Central's, and its journals are deposited in PubMed Central. It uses the Creative Commons Attribution License. In spite of publishing a small number of journals, PLoS is a very influential organization, and its founders are major figures in the open access movement.

Citebase

http://citebase.eprints.org/cgi-bin/search

This experimental citation analysis search engine from OpCit is like the Web of Science for e-prints, covering works in arXiv (UK), BioMed Central, and Cogprints. CiteBase was developed by the OpCit project.

Google Scholar

http://scholar.google.com/

This beta version of Google's new search engine allows you to "search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research." Other major search engines (e.g., Google, MSN Search, and Yahoo), while less specialized than Google Scholar and more prone to false drops, are also very useful tools for finding many e-prints and open access journal articles.

OAIster

http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister/

This OAI-PMH search service from the University of Michigan Digital Library Production Service, provides access to over 5.2 million metadata records from over 450 institutions. It offers one-stop-shopping for users in search of e-prints and other electronic documents in archives and repositories worldwide.

Perspectives in Electronic Publishing

http://aims.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pep.nsf

PEP is described by its creator, Steve Hitchcock, as a "journal-centered database." It's a unique, experimental system, and one that's quite useful for those interested in scholarly communication. It's a good finding tool for unearthing open access articles that are freely available on the Internet.

Scirus

http://www.scirus.com/srsapp/

Billed by Elsevier as the "most comprehensive science-specific search engine on the Internet," Scirus indexes e-prints, open access journal articles, technical reports, and other freely available electronic documents from selected archives, open access journal publishers, and repositories as well as science-oriented Web pages and ScienceDirect articles.

Citebase

http://citebase.eprints.org/cgi-bin/search

This experimental citation analysis search engine from OpCit is like the Web of Science for e-prints, covering works in arXiv (UK), BioMed Central, and Cogprints. CiteBase was developed by the OpCit project.

Software

DSpace

http://dspace.org/

Freely available as an open-source software, DSpace is an institutional repository system "that captures, stores, indexes, preserves, and redistributes an organization's research data." It was developed by MIT and Hewlett-Packard Labs. DSpace is often utilized by research libraries as their institutional repository software. It is designed to support a wide variety of digital objects and to allow distributed repository management (e.g., by academic departments). A variety of different types of organizations participate in the informal DSpace Federation, which "coordinates the planning, research, development, and distribution of DSpace." DSpace developers, managers, and users have formed a virtual community where they share their expertise though various mailing lists and a Wiki. "DSpace Committers" lead the ongoing software development effort. The Web site includes advice on how to design and build an institutional repository with DSpace.

Fedora

http://www.fedora.info/

Sponsored by the University of Virginia Library and Cornell University (with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation), the Fedora project is "devoted to the goal of providing open-source repository software that can serve as the foundation for many types of information management systems." The project Web site provides a software download form, software documentation, information about the project, and presentations and publications about Fedora.

GNU EPrints

http://software.eprints.org/

Developed by the Christopher Gutteridge et al. of the OpCit project, the free EPrints software is widely used to support different types of e-print archives in diverse settings, from departmental e-print archives to disciplinary archives. For detailed information about EPrints, see the EPrints Handbook (http://software.eprints.org/handbook/).

Open Journal Systems

http://www.pkp.ubc.ca/ojs/

The University of British Columbia's Public Knowledge Project, which is headed by John Willinsky, has developed the Open Journal Systems (OJS) software "for the purpose of making open access publishing a viable option for more journals." This free, open source, OAI-PMH-compliant software is used to manage peer-review and other editorial functions and to publish and index e-journals. It also has an e-mail notification function that sends new table of contents to readers, and additional capabilities that allow users "to post comments to articles, join in discussions or establish a personal portfolio of selected works." The Web site also provides access to PKP Support (support forums for the Project) and links to other open source journal systems.

HINARI

http://www.healthinternetwork.org/

Led by the World Health Organization, HINARI (Health InterNetwork Access to Research Initiative) "provides free or very low cost online access to the major journals in biomedical and related social sciences to local, non-profit institutions in developing countries" via the Internet. The eligibility for access is limited to academic/research institutions, teaching hospitals, government offices, and medical libraries in the countries listed at http://www.who.int/library/reference/temp/Eligible_countries.pdf. Eligible institutions are required to register first via the Web site to obtain its login password. A list of accessible journals is provided at http://www.healthinternetwork.org/src/j_list.php. Users can search for articles or browse the journals by title, by subject, by language, and by publisher. The Web site is also available in French and Spanish.

Weblogs

Open Access News (OAN)

http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html

Edited by Peter Suber, this extremely active Weblog chronicles the open access movement in detail. It is comprehensive and articulate, interweaving insightful, succinct commentary with summaries of articles, press releases, and other documents. If you want to know everything that happening with open access, this is the Weblog to read. Available on the Web and via e-mail and RSS.

• The Johns Hopkins
  Bloomberg School of Public Health


• Tufts University


• University
  of California, Irvine


• University of Notre Dame


• Utah State University

• Open Source
  Education Foundation — Purpose is to enhance K-12 education through
  the use of technologies and concepts derived from The Open Source and Free
  Software movement.


• School Forge
  — Mission is to unify independent organizations that advocate, use, and develop
  open resources for primary and secondary education.


• Global
  Network Academy — Purpose is the research and development of open source
  tools that promote distance learning and online communities.

• Stanford
  Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) - Stanford University's highly monitored
  source that meets academic standards and that can be used for citations.


• Connexions - A Rice University
  initiative, Connexions is more than an encyclopedia in that approaches learning
  in modules (a non-linear approach) that develop into courses. This resource
  is so free with its content that it even offers to share
  its technology.