Here is aletter from Stevan Harnad to Katie Mantell of SciDevNet, which should be of interest to information professionals trying to understand and promote open access to scientific literature. Arun [Subbiah Arunachalam] Dear Katie Mantell:

As you requested, I have transmitted widely your announcement about SciDevNet's coverage of open access: http://www.scidev.net/ms/open_access/

As you also ask for my comments, Here they are:

(1) The SciDevNet's coverage is very helpful and welcome, but at the moment it is *extremely* lop-sided, covering only one of the two roads to open access -- open-access journal publication -- but not the other road: open-access self-archiving of toll-access journal publications:

http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Articles/harnad.html

(2) You do cite the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) but you do not note that the BOAI consists of *two* open-access strategies, of which the second (BOAI-2) is open-access journal publication but the first (BOAI-1) is open-access self-archiving: http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml

(3) This is an important omission, because in actual numbers, open-access self-archiving is generating far more open access articles per year than open-access journal-publishing, and open-access via this road is also able to grow much sooner and faster. In fact, in all likelihood, the "green" road of open-access self-archiving is itself also the surest way to reach the "golden" road of open-access journal-publishing!

http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0026.gif

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Complete series:

http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving.htm

or

http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving.ppt

(4) This is why it is so important not to represent "open-access" as merely being synonymous with "open-access-publishing"!

(5) In your key reports and documents, you have mostly BOAI-2 reports and documents. May I suggest adding the following BOAI-1 reports and documents:

(i) The BOAI-1 (self-archiving) FAQ: http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/

(ii) The original self-archiving proposal (Okerson & ODonnell 1995) http://www.arl.org/scomm/subversive/toc.html

(iii) The University self-archiving policy model:

http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/archpolnew.html

(iv) The Research-Funder open-access policy model: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue35/harnad/

(v) The Berlin Open Access Declaration:

http://www.zim.mpg.de/openaccess-berlin/berlindeclaration.html

(vi) SPARC Institutional Repository Checklist & Resource Guide http://www.arl.org/sparc/IR/IR_Guide.html

(6) Among "Open Access Initiatives" could I suggest adding

(i) The SHERPA Project http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/

(ii) The DARE Project

http://www.surf.nl/en/themas/print/index2.php?oid=7

(iii) The Australian initiative

http://alia.org.au/publishing/incite/2002/10/eprints.html

(iv) French initiatives: http://www.tours.inra.fr/tours/doc/comsci.htm

(v) The cross-institutional archive, OAIster http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister/

(7) To "Open Access Literature" I suggest adding:

Harnad, S. (2001) The self-archiving initiative

http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Articles/harnad.html

Pinfield et al (2002) "Setting up an institutional e-print archive"

http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue31/eprint-archives/intro.html

And to links I would add:

Core metalist of open access eprint archives

http://opcit.eprints.org/archive-core-metalist.html

as well as the following resources:

Very large harvested cache of open-access arcticles in Computer Science: http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/cs

GNU Open-Source Self-Archiving Software: http://www.eprints.org/

Citation-Impact-Measuring Search Engine for Open-Access Achives: http://citebase.eprints.org/cgi-bin/search

Citation-Seeking Engine (looks for open-access full-texts) http://paracite.eprints.org/

American Scientist Forum (discussion of open access since 1998)

http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/september98-forum.html

Open Archives Initiative http://www.openarchives.org/

Powerpoints for promoting open access:

http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/berlin.ppt

http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/berlin.htm

http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/openaccess.ppt

http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/openaccess.htm

These recommendations are all intended so as to make the SciDevNet site's contribution to open-access complete, rather than being, as it is now, merely a review of the open-access journal-publishing portion of the overall movements and initiatives toward open access.

Sincerely,

Stevan Harnad

On Wed, 5 Nov 2003, Katie Mantell wrote:

...

Dear Stevan Harnad

Many thanks for your email in response to the editorial on communicating science in an electronic era.

We have posted it on our letters to the editor page (http://www.scidev.net/EditorLetters/) and have also taken the opportunity to post it on a special section of the website that we are launching today on "Open Access and Scientific Publishing" under 'Feedback and Debate'.

In this section (http://www.scidev.net/open_access) we have drawn together resources on access to scientific information in the developing world.

It includes: · Up-to-date news, features and opinion articles on the issues surrounding open access and scientific publishing · Descriptions of (and links to) current open access initiatives · Access to free scientific literature · Links to key reports · Comprehensive events section with the latest meeting proceedings and future events. · An opportunity for you to comment and give your views

We hope that this guide will be a useful and important resource for all those interested in open access to scientific information, and will provoke further critical thinking and discussion on the key issues.

I would therefore be grateful if you could pass this message on to colleagues and friends who might be interested (www.scidev.net/open_access). Also, do let me know if you have any comments on the section.

Best regards

Katie Mantell

============================================ Katie Mantell News Editor

SciDev.Net 11 Rathbone Place London W1T 1HR United Kingdom

Tel: +44 (0)20 7291 3695 Fax: +44 (0)20 7291 3697 ============================================ SciDev.Net - found at www.scidev.net - is a free-access website providing news, views and information on science, technology and the developing world.

NOTE: Complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open access to the peer-reviewed research literature online is available at the American Scientist September Forum (98 & 99 & 00 & 01 & 02 & 03):

http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/september98-forum.html

http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html

Posted discussion to: september98-forum@amsci-forum.amsci.org

Dual Open-Access Strategy: BOAI-2: Publish your article in a suitable open-access journal whenever one exists. BOAI-1: Otherwise, publish your article in a suitable toll-access journal and also self-archive it. http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml

http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/berlin.htm ________________________________________________________________________ Want to chat instantly with your online friends? Get the FREE Yahoo! Messenger http://mail.messenger.yahoo.co.uk