LACUNY Institute Blog

Don't Forget to Add Your Contributions to the Conference Wikiography

In the spirit of Open Access, the Institute is hosting a wiki where people can post what they consider to be the essential Open Access readings. To visit the wiki, go to http://lacuny.cuny.edu/institute/2005/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=Main.HomePage.
To add to the Wiki, just click the Edit Page button in the top right corner.
Open Access is about sharing information and resources. Why not share yours with the rest of the Institute?

France Calls For Digitization Project for Europe

A lot of the library listservs have been discussing French President Jacques Chirac's statement that European countries need a large-scale project to digitize books, much like Google's now-famous project.
The Search Engine Watch blog has a nice overview of the situation, with some good links.

Open Access in Scotland

The Scottish university community is getting active about open access.
Sixteen universities have signed a declaration of open access The schools agree to set up online libraries of research findings and post doctorate papers. Some schools will make it mandatory for its scholars to publish their work in an open access environment.

ARL's Open Access Bibliography Published

The Association of Research Libraries has published "Open Access Bibliography:
Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals."
The ARL is selling it, but in keeping with the spirit of open access, it's also available here as a PDF.

The Keystroke Strategy

The Guardian has news on an open access strategy that might be gaining steam in the United Kingdom.
It's called the "keystroke strategy":

[It] calls for all academics who have had research papers accepted by journals to place information about the paper — such as its title and author, known as metadata — on a university's own archive for all to see. Alongside that should be a copy of the article itself.

Apparently, in the UK 92% of academic publishers allow this type of behavior, which is considered self-archiving.
You just have to wonder how easy it will be to find all of this research, scattered all over the Internet.

Directory of Open Access Repositories

The University of Nottingham, UK and University of Lund, Sweden are working on creating an Open Access repository directory.
The project doesn't seem quite live yet, but there's a lot of information at www.opendoar.org/index.html.
According to their FAQ page, the project won't let users search individual articles. Instead, users will use DOAR to find a good place to search for open access materials.

Open Access Goods and Services?

The Economist has an interesting article on the economics of open access movements.
First, they talk about why open access/open source works:

The characteristics of information — be it software, text or even biotech research — make it an economically obvious thing to share. It is a "non-rival" good: ie, your use of it does not interfere with my use. Better still, there are network effects: ie, the more people who use it, the more useful it is to any individual user.

Then, they talk about the next step in sharing — tangible goods.

One of the most articulate proponents of the open-source approach, Yochai Benkler of Yale Law School, argues in a recent paper that sharing is emerging for certain physical, rivalrous goods and will probably increase due to advances in technology. Where open source was about sharing information by way of the internet, what is happening now, Mr Benkler notes, is the sharing of the tangible tools of technology themselves, like computing power and bandwidth. This is because they are widely distributed among individuals, and sold in such a way that there is inherent (and abundant) unused capacity.

You can read Benkler's paper here: http://www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/114-2/Benkler_FINAL_YLJ114-2.pdf.