New subject: The Sabo Bill and Open Access

27 Jul 2004

      Date: Mon, 26 Jul 2004 07:26:27 +0100 (BST)
From: "[iso-8859-1] Subbiah Arunachalam" 

Sathya asks how would champions of OA like to deal
with secondary services [sucha as Chemical Abstracts]?

I have not yet read his editorial and I will wait till
the print version arrives, but in the meantime let me
do a bit of loud thinking.

The main purpose of OA in general is to make primary
research findings available free to anyone who cares
to read them. Especially final versions of refereed
papers. This goal can be achieved two ways: OAP and
OAA. There are now more than a thousand OAP journals.
Many of them charge a fee upfront from the authors
(who in turn charge it to their funding agencies).
This model is the 'author pays' model of BMC and PLoS.
There are others [like Current Science and Pramana]
which do not charge any fee from the authors or
readers. They charge a subscription fee to print
subscribers and probably get grants from funding
agencies.

In the OAA approach, authors deposit the full text of
their papers [preprints, final accepted versions of
papers, and postprints] in archives - either a central
archive such as arXiv or an institutional archive. As
the institutional archives are interoperable, to the
searcher it would appear as if all these papers are
located in one distant server; one does not have to
search several servers. What is important to note is
that OAA has adopted the key features of secondary
services such as the use of metadata tags to make a
search for relevant documents.

If all researchers deposit their papers in
institutional archives [as recommended recently by the
UK House of Commons S&T Committee] anyone having a
decent Internet connection can access any of those
papers deposited anywhere in the world using metadata
[keywords, etc].

This is what the secondary services try to achieve
partially. Imagine that I access the print version of
Chemical Abstracts. Using keywords, I can locate
papers of my interest. If I use the electronic version
[SciFinder] I can not only find out papers of my
interest but often can navigate my way to the actual
documents themselves, as SciFinder has agreements with
many primary journals.

In a perfect world, the secondary services will become
superfluous. My guess is if the archiving habit picks
up [as it has to a large extent in physics], many
scientists will find it less and less necessary to go
to secondary services. A clear example of what
advances in technology can do to the ways in which we
acquire knowledge.

The Sabo Bill, as proposed by Congressman Martin Sabo,
has a few loopholes as pointed out in some discussion
lists. Peter Suber has suggested some improvements.
With those improvements, if accepted by the US
Congress, the Bill will do a lot of good.

Of course OA will not cover secondary services.

Arun

--- Mailing List Manager 
wrote: > Date: Wed, 21 Jul 2004 19:32:45 +0530
...
From: sathya 
Hi Arun
Our Feb 2004 editorial in U&I focuses on Martin
Saboo's bill and its
implications - "OAI and the Copyright Battle"
http://www.informindia.co.in/u&i/Feb2004/u&i.htm
A QUESTION(that haunts me), to Forum members.
What should be the OAI's approach to "Indexes and
database Aggregations"?
For example, "Chemical Abstracts" and "the Journal
of American Chemical
Society" are different species of knowledge-animal,
of entirely different
value.
Please note, a new separate Act is enacted recently
by US Government to
copyright protect databases, while Saboo's bill
seeks to take-out federally
funded (substantially) research publications out of
copyright.
Sathya
--------------------------------------------------
N V Sathyanarayana
Informatics
www.informindia.co.in
--------------------------------------------------
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