I agree with most of the points raised by Jeetender.
The proponents of Open Access <
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/brief.htm > are striving to free up
academic literature from all barriers. This would create a World -
Wide Research Infrastructure for further research and its utilisation
for the sake of betterment of human race. This pool of OA literature
would give chance for librarians to develop value addition services
like meta data harvasting and aggregation.
Copyrights are always with producers / authors. However authors need
distribution channel (Publisher) for wide distribution of their ideas
and appreciation for their work. So they transfer their rights to
publishers. However rising costs have been creating barrier to access.
This is defeating the very purpose (wide distribution) for which
authors are surrendering their rights.
Now on conferences -- to me it appears that money raising has become
the main purpose of conferences and workshops in India and elsewhere.
But I ask, Why don't authors retain and excercise their rights to
deposit their works in publically accessible repositories? <
http://archives.eprints.org/ > In this age of Internet, why to publish
in a journal or present a paper in a conference that take away
unethically your own work? Well they have their points - Peer-Review
and Certification. Even then this should not come into the way of OA
self-archiving. < http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/ >
We should ponder over the points raised by Jeetender. When we will
graduate to "Activists" from "Voyeurs and Reporters".
--Sukhdev Singh.
On 10/05/06, Jeetender Chandna
Dear Friends
We all know that a war is on --> publishers vs producers.
The first thing that comes to my mind - when speaking of copyright - public funded agencies should NOT be permitted to hold any copyright.
The movement of Creative Commons Licenses http://creativecommons.org is a great move forward towards liberating information for the common good.
The Conference call for papers http://www.icdim.org/submission.asp seems to be a Case-in-point for the above statements.
By what right does a publisher, even if they sponsor, become copyright holders of infornation produced in the public domain. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1st International Conference on Digital Information Management (ICDIM) December 06-08, 2006 Christ College, Bangalore, India ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The copyright document by IEEE states: "4. In the case of a Work performed under a U.S. Government contract or grant, the IEEE recognizes that the U.S. Government has royalty-free permission to reproduce all or portions of the Work, and to authorize others to do so, for official U.S. Government purposes only, if the contract/grant so requires."
NOW, this is for a conference to be held in INDIA.
A word from the organisers would be very much welcome in this regard.
To be impertinent, I would frankly say that by and large our group of librarians and library leaders are largely a group of voyeurs and reporters. What INDIA needs is : ACTIVISTS
Secondly, in this age of video-conferencing and the all powerful internet, it seems such a waste of National Resources, that is to conduct in-person conferences.
If we have to say something, we should organise local video-conf units, thereby eliminating expensive travel etc. Fringe benefits could be obtained by live streaming of the speaker which could be accessed by many more people.
Yes, another fringe would be the feasibiity of attending only sessions of interest to oneself.
Of late, most of us have, I presume, come to believe that the digital road is the path of the future. So why are we so tardy in its implementation.
-- Regards Granthpal ---------------------------------------- Jeetender Chandna aka Vicky aka Granthpal Esha News Monitoring Services Pvt Ltd 10th Floor, Krushal Commercial Complex Chembur (W) Mumbai 400089 Tel: (91-22) 3245 2861 Email: granthpal@gmail.com
_______________________________________________ LIS-Forum mailing list LIS-Forum@ncsi.iisc.ernet.in http://ncsi.iisc.ernet.in/mailman/listinfo/lis-forum