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Open access law introduced in USA
by Mailing List Manager 30 Jun '03

30 Jun '03

Date: Sat, 28 Jun 2003 10:23:53 +0530 From: Subbiah Arunachalam <arun(a)mssrf.res.in> Open access law introduced US congressman joins push to promote public access to publicly funded research | By Catherine Zandonella <mailto:catzan@nasw.org> The debate over open access to scientific literature intensified this week with the introduction of federal legislation designed to curb publishers' control over scientific publishing. The bill, introduced in the US House of Representatives yesterday (June 26) by Rep. Martin Sabo <http://www.house.gov/sabo/> (D-Minn.), is one part of a larger campaign, launched by the open-access Public Library of Science <http://www.plos.org> (PLoS), to raise a national debate on the issue of access to scientific literature. As part of the campaign, the PLoS this week began running a 30-second television ad <http://www.plos.org/support/playvideo.html> designed to introduce the topic to the lay public. The ads will run during popular prime-time shows, such as "The Simpsons." Rep. Sabo drafted and introduced the bill after the PLoS approached him and explained that while federal tax dollars support research, access to the results is limited to scientists whose libraries can afford high subscription fees and to those lay people lucky enough to live near a public institutional library. "Most people are shocked when they find out they cannot access the results of studies that their tax dollars paid for," said Sabo's legislative assistant Lisa Tomlinson, who was involved in writing the bill. The proposed legislation, called the Public Access to Science Act, would prohibit copyright protection for any works stemming from substantially federally funded research. If enacted into law, the bill could radically change how scientific journals do business <http://www.biomedcentral.com/news/20030616/03/>, since most journals currently require authors to transfer copyright to the journal as a condition of publication. The bill would amend an existing passage in copyright law to add federal grantees to a provision that bars federal employees from copyright on their publications. The bill does not state what percentage of the research must be supported by federal dollars to trigger the no-copyright rule. "We wanted to leave that to the discretion of the federal agencies," said Tomlinson. Without copyright, journals would still be able to publish articles much as they do now, but they would not be able to control the distribution or republishing of the articles. Publishers say they need copyright in order to control a publication's quality. "Errors creep in as a paper is repeatedly copied and circulated," said Peter Farnham, public affairs officer for the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology <http://www.asbmb.org>, which publishes the Journal of Biological Chemistry. The JBC's content already is freely available, he noted. Advocates of open access say that publishers should not own the copyright because the amount of work that the journal does-procuring peer review, editing, and laying out the article on the page-does not justify ownership. "Their [the publisher's] contribution to the finished product pales in comparison to contributions from scientists and the general public," said Michael Eisen <http://rana.lbl.gov/>, cofounder of PLoS and a geneticist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California, Berkeley. Bringing the public into the open-access debate is a natural next step for PLoS, Eisen said. PLoS plans to launch <http://www.biomedcentral.com/news/20021220/06/> its first open-access, peer-reviewed journal this October, and each paper will be accompanied by a plain-English summary. The television ads, which began running on June 23 in San Francisco, Washington, and Boston, show a man who flies to work, rather than drives. The voice-over implies that the open access to journals made the technology possible. http://www.biomedcentral.com/news/20030627/04

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Re: [LIS-Forum] accessioning CDs
by Mailing List Manager 30 Jun '03

30 Jun '03

Dear friend, Ours is an engineering college library in Bangalore. As you said we get CD^s in different ways. With monographs, with journals and independently. We treat this as separate entities so that it can be borrowed by the users if required for special installations in different labs. The CD^s which come with the technical magazines or journals gives all the information that is printed on the CD^s by the publisher. This is shown in the Abstract section or note section of the online catalogue and is indexed. So when a users gives a search for any tutorials, or any topic in the OPAC all the related CD^s are retrived within a minit and we can easily trace them because all these CD^s are arranged number wise in a CD cabinet. Our students are making maximum use of these CD^s and this system is working fine in our college. Regards, Gayathri Sen, PESIT

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Re: [LIS-Forum] accessioning CDs
by Mailing List Manager 30 Jun '03

30 Jun '03

Date: Fri, 27 Jun 2003 07:50:32 -0700 (PDT) From: Atanu Garai <atanu_garai2000(a)yahoo.com> Dear Sir, The management of CDs depends on various factors.I have seen many libraries having a completely different management system for optical discs.Usually these are stored in seprate protective cases. Intially these CDs are catalogued on simple computer produced print catalogues as their numbers are limited. Still many libraries which have introduced optical disc based services ie reference,document delivery etc and have CD acquiring program have not been implementing any complete document management system for the acquired CDs. Ususally automated bibliogarphic management systems should have the capabilities of capturing the metadata elements unique for CDs.But mnay such systems has not been developed with approprite searching conditions typical for CDs. In situations such as this, computer printed catalogue is usually chosen as effective if the number of CDs available in the library is limited. This is effective because if the number of CDs are within 500! , the total page of the print cataloge is limited enough to be easily xeroxed and circulated to the individual clientle. It is the common practice of our libraies to tear off the accompanying maaterials from the original documents and supply the clients when demand for the same arises. In such cases appropriate instructions should be provided to the users on the availability of such materials and the ordering instruction of the same. But it is recommended that such optical discs(and even magnetic discs such floppies) should be detached off and preserved in separate location for their appropriate maintenance. Various standards are avialbale for thier rightful maintenance as brought out by national and international organizations including ISO,BIS,IFLA,ICA,UNESCO to name a few.To maintain thier recommendartions it is important to shelve them in different storage conditions than print media.This also arises the problems of the management of the same. In any case, it can be suggested for accessioning CDs, a note on the availability of such materials shall be noted in the appropriate register and if possible, a separate register should be maintained. Hope this helps. Regards. Atanu Garai Atanu Garai MLIS Student 2001-03 Department of Library and Information Science University of Calcutta College St.Campus Kolkata 700 073 India Ph(O)+91(0)33 2241 0071/74 (R)+91(0)33 2543 6870 Fax(O)+91(0)33 2241 3222 Email:atanu_garai@hotmail.com OR atanu_garai(a)indiatimes.com http://profiles.takingitglobal.org/atanu_garai

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Institutional Archives and Open Access journals
by Mailing List Manager 30 Jun '03

30 Jun '03

Date: Thu, 26 Jun 2003 15:51:06 +0530 From: Subbiah Arunachalam <arun(a)mssrf.res.in> How can the LIS professionals in our country help promote the Open Access and Self Archiving movements? How do we convince our scientists and doctoral students that it is in their own interest to set up institutional archives and to publish in open access journals? How can we make our LIS colleagues more proactive and mount a crusade as it were? Arun

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accessioning CDs
by Dr Murari P Tapaswi 27 Jun '03

27 Jun '03

Dear Collegaues, I would like to know the ways the libraries are accessioning CDs arriving in their collection. To my knowledge, there are following types: 1. Documents purchased as CDs 2. CDs as part of the monograph 3. CDs as part of a magazine/journal 4. CDs arrived as free distribution With warm regards, Murari P Tapaswi National Information Centre for Marine Sciences (NICMAS) National Institute of Oceanography Dona Paula 403 004 Goa, India e-mail: murari(a)darya.nio.org Phone: 91-(0)832-2456700 ext. 2475 Fax: 91-(0)832-2456702

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YTimes.com Article: Measure Calls for Wider Access to Federally Financed Research
by Mailing List Manager 27 Jun '03

27 Jun '03

Date: Fri, 27 Jun 2003 09:04:44 +0530 From: Subbiah Arunachalam <arun(a)mssrf.res.in> Friends: We in India and other developing countries should work towards such a legislation. We should congratulate the Indian Academy of Sciences for making electronic versions of all its journals available free on the Internet. The Academy also held two three-day workshops in March 2002 for editors (and publishers) of Indian S&T journals on electronic journals and open access. We should persuade other Indian journal editors to make their electronic versions freely accessible on the Net. Also, we should encourage our universities and research laboratories to self-archive their research publications, as IISc is trying to do now. Studies have shown that papers that are freely available on the Net are cited three times more often than those published in subscription journals. Arun [Subbiah Arunachalam] arun(a)mssrf.res.in ------ Measure Calls for Wider Access to Federally Financed Research June 26, 2003 By WARREN E. LEARY WASHINGTON, June 25 - A group challenging the power of established scientific journals says legislation will be introduced to make the results of all federally financed research available to the public. The group, the Public Library of Science, which includes scientists, doctors, researchers and their public supporters, plans to announce legislation on Thursday that would give taxpayers greater access to scientific data. The group's objective is an open system of scientific publishing that would bypass the current system, which centers on journals that charge, through their subscriptions, for access to results. The measure places results of research financed primarily by the government into the public domain so access cannot be prohibited by copyright, said Dr. Michael B. Eisen, a co-founder of the library, and a biologist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The bill also calls on federal agencies to improve access to their research results. Representative Martin Olav Sabo, Democrat of Minnesota, is to introduce the measure, called the Public Access to Science Act. A spokesman said that Mr. Sabo was concerned about patients' access to the latest medical research and that he would seek co-sponsors for the bill. American taxpayers invest about $45 billion a year in scientific and medical research, and the results should be readily available to them, Mr. Sabo said. The measure places results of research financed primarily by the government into the public domain so access cannot be prohibited by copyright, said Dr. Michael B. Eisen, a co-founder of the library, and a biologist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The bill also calls on federal agencies to improve access to their research results. Representative Martin Olav Sabo, Democrat of Minnesota, is to introduce the measure, called the Public Access to Science Act. A spokesman said that Mr. Sabo was concerned about patients' access to the latest medical research and that he would seek co-sponsors for the bill. American taxpayers invest about $45 billion a year in scientific and medical research, and the results should be readily available to them, Mr. Sabo said. "It defies logic to collectively pay for our medical research, only to privatize its profitability and availability," he said in a statement. Dr. Harold E. Varmus, president of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York and chairman of the Public Library of Science, said the legislation would help get out the message that scientific results should be more easily available to more people. "Privately owned journals can't tie up scientific information, and people should begin discussing this issue," Dr. Varmus said. The Public Library of Science, with the help of a $9 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, will begin publishing an online, peer-reviewed journal on biology in October, followed by a medical science journal early next year. Access to the journals is to be free, and the operating expenses are to be financed by $1,500 fees charged to researchers whose papers appear. Most research grants are large enough to include payments for publishing results, proponents say. Traditional journals like Nature and Science publish papers at no charge to researchers but recoup costs and sometimes make profits with advertising and paid subscriptions, on paper and online. Dr. Alan I. Leshner, chief executive of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which publishes the journal Science, said everyone concerned with scientific publishing was looking for the best way to improve assess to information on the Internet and elsewhere. "We are all looking for the best model to assure access to quality scientific information," Dr. Leshner said, "We're experimenting with different methods to do the same thing." Science magazine, for instance, is giving free online access to institutions in developing countries and providing site licenses to hundreds of universities so that everyone on those campuses has free access. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/26/politics/26LIBR.html?ex=1057682372&ei=1&e… f3f99c0da5843 ---------------------------------

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"copyleft" licensing
by Benny MD 26 Jun '03

26 Jun '03

Dear professionals As information/knowledge managers it become our duty to allow free flow of information. Any barrier to this will delay or even prevent the birth of new information, and probably result in the misuse of the existing one. In this context it is apt to think about adopting the "copyleft" rules and apply the same in the "context" of printed documents. I encourage you all to comment on this and express your views on "intellectual property right" What is copyleft? "Copyleft," in the popular usage of the term, means "a copyright notice that permits unrestricted redistribution and modification, provided that all copies and derivatives retain the same permissions." The idea of copyleft originated with uber-hacker Richard Stallman in 1983 when he started the GNU Project. In brief, his goal was "to develop a complete free Unix-like operating system." As part of that goal, he invented and wrote the GNU General Public License, a legal construct that included a copyright notice but added to it (or, technically, removed certain restrictions), so its terms allowed for the freedoms of reuse, modification and reproduction of a work or its derivatives to be kept for all. The idea is to have a free society where any license or copyright is unnecessary, and where anyone could share all published works for the common good with no sovereign-nation laws dictating who can say or use what in their expression or communication. For more information please visit Reference http://www.dsl.org/copyleft/ http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/nonsoftware-copyleft.html http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/copyleft.html ___________________________________________________________________________ ******************************************************* * BENNY M.D. * * LIBRARIAN * * DEPARTMENT OF MATHEMATICS * * INDIAN INSTITUTE OF SCIENCE * * BANGALORE-12., KARNATAKA, INDIA. * * PH:2932265 (EXTN.317) * * EMAIL: benny(a)math.iisc.ernet.in * * mdliles72(a)yahoo.com * *******************************************************

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Professor designation to university librarian-parity with the teachers- implications
by Prof. N. Laxman Rao. 25 Jun '03

25 Jun '03

dear friends, Recently, Govt of Andhra Pradesh had issued GO Ms. No 35 dated 16-06-2003. sub: Universities- Uniform designation of Librarians, Deputy Librarians, assistant Librarians and Documentation Officers working in all Universities. The Govt had isssued GO and the crux of the GO is "After careful examination of the proposal of the Secretary, AP Stae Council of Higher Education, Govt have decided to adopt the uniform o designations by re-designating the posts of the University Library Professionals, who are drqwing UGC Scales. i.e. University Librarian, deputy Librarain, assistant Librarian and Documentation Officer to that of Professor in LIS, Associate Professor in LIS and Assistant Professor in LIS respectively" subject to there is no financial commitment on the part of the Governement and also the following conditions. 1. Asst Librarians working in the Universities possess the same qualifications like the Librarains earlier working in Govt Degree Colleges and later designated as Lecturers in Library Science vide GOMas No. 91. 2. The Asst Librarians have the duties separately identified and as and when necessary they may be asked to teach classes and they are not regular teaching staff of the Dept of LIS. 3. The Asst Librarains are non-vacation academic staff charged with the responsibility of offering academic services to various depts. in the Universities. THE IMPLICATIONS OF THE GO : 1. Till now the library staff were retiring by the age 58, now it gives a clear guidance TO THE Universities for retiring them at 60 (in AP the teachers retire at 60). This is advantage to the libraraians. Thanks to the Govt of AP. 2. Recently, the UGC had given a clarification that the Deputy Librarains are not eligible for CAS to enable them to be promoted as Librarians (Professor scale). Now the implication of this GO is Deputy Librarians are eligible under CAS and can get the Professor or Librarians scale.- thanks. 3. There was a contradiction in UGC norms for CAS to Asst Librarians. They were to be governed by OLD NORMS for CAS, and several universities were giving the promotion after 16 years (with out Ph.D. But this GO's implication is they also need to be considered selection grade after 11 years (with out Ph.D.). 4.The third condition of the GO is the Asst Librarians are non-vacation staff. It implies that others that is both Deputy Librarians and Librarians could be considered as vacation staff. 5. The ASST Librarians possess the same qualifications mentioned in GO no 91. That means, the present UGC qualifications are not necessary. Old qualifications stand good? 6. Unfortunately, the GO specifies, that only Asst Librarians are to be associated with teaching as and when asked to teach classes. How about seniors, (both Deputy Librarians and Librarians)? They should have also been considered for the same status. The professionals and Professiona Associations thank the Government of AP for considering favourably the problems of University Library Staff. The present GO has solved problems of University library staff of the State. LAXMAN RAO ===== Prof.N.LAXMAN RAO, Dept.of Library & Information Science, Osmania University, HYDERABAD- 500 007 (INDIA) President, Indian Association of Teachers in Library and Information Science (IATLIS) AND President, Academy of Library Science & Documentation, Hyderabad. Ph:+91-40-27171565 (res): +91-40- 27682290 (off) e:mail-- naglaxman(a)yahoo.com OR naglaxman(a)indiatimes.com ________________________________________________________________________ Want to chat instantly with your online friends? Get the FREE Yahoo! Messenger http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com/

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Library Manager 6.5
by Shyam Prasad pujar 25 Jun '03

25 Jun '03

Dear Member, 'Library Manager' is a library automation software suitable for small libraries. Through this one can undertake works of acquisition, circulation, search for books, etc. Reports on various aspects can be generated using this software. Backup, Restoration of backup and generation of Barcode label facilities are also available. This software is still in its nascent stage, suggestions may be forwarded to the developer of this software Mr Sawan Gupta. He is an Engineering student studying at Jaipur. It is a FREE-WARE available for download at the following URL address. It works on most of the versions of MS-Windows. http://sawansoft.cjb.net Regards, S.M. Pujar ********************************************************************** Shamprasad M. Pujar Assistant Librarian Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research Gen. Vaidya Marg, Film City Road Goregaon (East) MUMBAI-400 065 India %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% * Phone: (022) 28400919-21 Extn: 514 * * Fax: (022) 28402752 * * E-mail: pujar(a)igidr.ac.in * * URL: http://www.igidr.ac.in * %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

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Software to make you a better writer!!
by Benny MD 24 Jun '03

24 Jun '03

Dear professionals Hope some of you will find this information useful. StyleWriter software helps anyone learn the secrets of editing, by cutting words and simplifying your style. Usually, StyleWriter helps you cut a quarter of the words from your draft and this lets your reader concentrate on your information. StyleWriter helps you write in plain language by highlighting your poor writing habits and helping you change them. It also measures and questions your use of long sentences and passive verbs and makes you think about every word you write. For more information, online demo and a trial version pls visit http://www.editorsoftware.com/stylewriter-software/ -- ___________________________________________________________________________ ******************************************************* * BENNY M.D. * * LIBRARIAN * * DEPARTMENT OF MATHEMATICS * * INDIAN INSTITUTE OF SCIENCE * * BANGALORE-12., KARNATAKA, INDIA. * * PH:2932265 (EXTN.317) * * EMAIL: benny(a)math.iisc.ernet.in * * mdliles72(a)yahoo.com * *******************************************************

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