[LIS-Forum] Re: OA

[Sukhdev Singh]

I am enclosing the contents of the link by Peter Suber on . Which
would be useful for anyone new to OA. Hope others won't mind.

--Sukhdev Singh, NIC. http://openmed.nic.in

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

A Very Brief Introduction to Open Access
    by Peter Suber

    Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge,
and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. What makes it
possible is the internet and the consent of the author or
copyright-holder.

    In most fields, scholarly journals do not pay authors, who can
therefore consent to OA without losing revenue. In this respect
scholars and scientists are very differently situated from most
musicians and movie-makers, and controversies about OA to music and
movies do not carry over to research literature.

    OA is entirely compatible with peer review, and all the major OA
initiatives for scientific and scholarly literature insist on its
importance. Just as authors of journal articles donate their labor, so
do most journal editors and referees participating in peer review.

    OA literature is not free to produce, even if it is less expensive
to produce than conventionally published literature. The question is
not whether scholarly literature can be made costless, but whether
there are better ways to pay the bills than by charging readers and
creating access barriers. Business models for paying the bills depend
on how OA is delivered.

    There are two primary vehicles for delivering OA to research
articles: OA journals and OA archives or repositories.

        * OA archives or repositories do not perform peer review, but
simply make their contents freely available to the world. They may
contain unrefereed preprints, refereed postprints, or both. Archives
may belong to institutions, such as universities and laboratories, or
disciplines, such as physics and economics. Authors may archive their
preprints without anyone else's permission, and a majority of journals
already permit authors to archive their postprints. When archives
comply with the metadata harvesting protocol of the Open Archives
Initiative, then they are interoperable and users can find their
contents without knowing which archives exist, where they are located,
or what they contain. There is now open-source software for building
and maintaining OAI-compliant archives and worldwide momentum for
using it. The costs of an archive are negligible: some server space
and a fraction of the time of a technician.

        * OA journals perform peer review and then make the approved
contents freely available to the world. Their expenses consist of peer
review, manuscript preparation, and server space. OA journals pay
their bills very much the way broadcast television and radio stations
do: those with an interest in disseminating the content pay the
production costs upfront so that access can be free of charge for
everyone with the right equipment. Sometimes this means that journals
have a subsidy from the hosting university or professional society.
Sometimes it means that journals charge a processing fee on accepted
articles, to be paid by the author or the author's sponsor (employer,
funding agency). OA journals that charge processing fees usually waive
them in cases of economic hardship. OA journals with institutional
subsidies tend to charge no processing fees. OA journals can get by on
lower subsidies or fees if they have income from other publications,
advertising, priced add-ons, or auxiliary services. Some institutions
and consortia arrange fee discounts. Some OA publishers waive the fee
for all researchers affiliated with institutions that have purchased
an annual membership. There's a lot of room for creativity in finding
ways to pay the costs of a peer-reviewed OA journal, and we're far
from having exhausted our cleverness and imagination.

    For a longer introduction, with live links for further reading,
see my Open Access Overview,
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm.

First put online December 29, 2004.

This introduction is also available in Bangla, Catalan, Czech, Dutch,
French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Slovenian, Spanish and
Ukrainian. I welcome other translations.

Peter Suber
Open Access Project Director, Public Knowledge
Research Professor of Philosophy, Earlham College
Senior Researcher, SPARC
peters at earlham.edu

Copyright (c) 2004-2005, Peter Suber. This is an open-access document.


> From: "Rajendra Thaty" <pitam97 at rediffmail.com>
> Subject: [LIS-Forum] OA
> To: lis-forum at ncsi.iisc.ernet.in, oa-india at dgroups.org,
>         c3net at dgroups.org
> Message-ID: <20051025071052.12333.qmail at webmail52.rediffmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
>
>
> Dear All,
>
> Can anybody tell me what is Open Access Initiative and in what way it is better that the traditional journal literature? What are the various OAI models in India and abroad? Which one is the best? I may sound foolish but someone could please help me out .
>
>
> Regards,
>
> Rajendra
>
>
> Rajendra Kumar Thaty
> Librarian
> Samabalpur University Central Library
> Jyoti Vihar, Burla,
> Sambalpur, Orissa
> PIN 768019
> Telephone# 0663-2430548 (O)
> 98610-47084 (Mob)