Congratulations Dr. Sabuj for highlighting the issues of Open Access
and its types. You have already answered most of the issues yourself.
If one still has any doubt or needs some more information - the
following sources can be referred:
Open Access Overview -
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/brief.htm
or
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm
One can also check up the FAQ (Frequently asked Questions)
http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/
I strongly believe Open Access (OA) is not different from First Law
of Library Science. Both advocate easy access to knowledge. OA is very
fundamental to the philosophy of Library and Librarianship. After-all
Library is all about REUSABILITY". And Librarianship is all about
providing access to Wisdom of Mankind for its further advancement.
Provinding Access includes removing barrier to this access.
No wonder, Commercial interest would always wish that every
student/reader/researcher purchase his all reading materials /
journal articles.
--Sukhdev Singh.
http://openmed.nic.in
On 19/09/06, sabuj kumar chaudhuri
Open-Access has become a buzz-word in these days. Many renowned persons are also advocating strongly for OA. It is said that there are 2 schools regarding OA initiatives- one is, journal reform school and other one is self-archiving school. Both can be regarded as an alternative to models for accessing to the copyrighted academic and scientific information. As a concept and philosophy, it is great. It is very true that the research conducted in various R & D labs like CSIR Labs, ICMR Labs, DBT Labs, and ICAR Labs is done with the public money collected from the people. Hence, people have every right to access these scientific results in the form of a research report that are mostly published in the peer reviewed journals with strong copyright policy. But unfortunately, presently, OA initiatives have very little impact on S & T researchers for whom the total initiative is meant for. If they do not believe in this novel movement, the effort of our initiative will be of no use. We have to make them convinced in all platforms about its merits and at the same time persuasion of big scholarly publishing houses should be done from all possible angles. Developing countries already achieved pioneering initiatives in many places to promote OA and therefore they should play the leading role in shaping OA world wide. The questions related with economics, copyright, OA and sustainable development are important practical questions and we will have to develop a model for its sustenance. But the great dilemma is that, will this dream of OA be ever possible or it will bow down to copyright lobby of multinationals of the West. Already developed world has responded by suggesting that OA is dangerous to scientific innovation and will destroy already existing peer-reviewed journals. Some of the multinational publishing houses have changed their copyright agreements in order to support OA self-archiving. The results of the RoMEo study attest to this. It is still unclear, will majority of the publishersallow it or not. Still most of the scientists do prefer to publish their research reports in subscription based journals.All scientists should encourage to join this great movement to protect our knowledge and heritage and they must make them understand that copyright can stand as a barrier to the diffusion of their academic work, a barrier to the percolation of the knowledge to the grass root level, an agent that enhance disparity among people and countries , increase the gap between the 'haves' and 'have nots'. Let us promise together, we will make them convinced at any cost otherwise that days are not too far when all knowledge will be privatized, caged and monopolized in the hands of some few multinational publishing houses.
SABUJ KUMAR CHAUDHURI SENIOR RESEARCH FELLOW DEPARTMENT OF LIBRARY & INFORMATION SCIENCE JADAVPUR UNIVERSITY KOLKATA-700 032