Copyright and Open Access for Academic Works :
« In a recent paper, Prof. Steven Shavell (see Shavell, 2009) has argued strongly in favor of eliminating copyright from academic works. Based upon solid economic arguments, Shavell analyses the pros and cons of removal of copyright and in its place to have a pure open access system, in which authors (or more likely their employers) would provide the funds that keep journals in business. In this paper we explore some of the arguments in Shavell’s paper, above all the way in which the distribution of the sources of journal revenue would be altered, and the feasible effects upon the quality of journal content. We propose a slight modification to a pure open access system which may provide for the best of both the copyright and open access worlds. »
URL : http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/24095/
Economic and Social Returns on Investment in Open Archiving Publicly Funded Research Outputs
The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) provided support for a feasibility study, to outline one possible approach to measuring the impacts of the proposed US Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) on returns to public investment in R&D. The aim is to define and scope the data collection requirements and further model developments necessary for a more robust estimate of the likely impacts of the proposed FRPAA open archiving mandate.
Preliminary modeling suggests that over a transitional period of 30 years from implementation, the potential incremental benefits of the proposed FRPAA archiving mandate might be worth between 4 and 24 times the costs. Perhaps two-thirds of these benefits would accrue within the US, with the remainder spilling over to other countries. Hence, the US national benefits arising from the proposed FRPAA archiving mandate might be of the order of 16 times the costs.
Exploring sensitivities in the model we find that the benefits exceed the costs over a wide range of values. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine any plausible values for the input data and model parameters that would lead to a fundamentally different answer.
These preliminary estimates are based on the information available to us at the time of writing. They are released in conjunction with an online model, which enables others to explore their own preferred values for the various parameters.
Report on Best Practices and Recommendat…
Report on Best Practices and Recommendations :
« This report is the third in a series of studies conducted by OAPEN on digital monographs in the Humanities and Social Sciences. The first report focused on the needs of users and stakeholders, and the second looked at the existing (and developing) publishing and business models. The aim of this report is to provide the different players—publishers, funders, librarians, readers, scholars and politicians—with a set of recommendations concerning the strategic issues in Open Access book publishing. For those already in the process of developing an Open Access policy, this report maps out the issues and decisions they may confront. »
URL : http://www.oapen.org/images/D316_OAPEN_Best_practice_public_report.pdf
Will open-access publication fees grow o…
Will open-access publication fees grow out of control? : http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/pamphlet/2010/07/31/will-open-access-publication-fees-grow-out-of-control/
Who owns our work? : « Much turmoil in t…
Who owns our work? :
« Much turmoil in the scholarly-communication ecosystem appears to revolve around simple ownership of intellectual property. Unpacking that notion, however, produces a fascinating tangle of stakeholders, desires, products and struggles. Some products of the research process, especially novel ones, are difficult to fit into legal concepts of ownership. As collaborative research burgeons, traditional ownership and authorship criteria are stretched to their limits and beyond, with many contributors still feeling short of due credit. The desire for access and impact brings institutions and grant funders into the formerly exclusive relationship between authors and publishers. Librarians, stripped of first-sale rights by electronic licensing, wonder about both access and long-term preservation. Emerging solutions to many of these difficulties threaten to cut publishers out of the picture altogether, perhaps a welcome change to those stakeholders who find publishers’ behavior to block progress. »
URL : http://minds.wisconsin.edu/bitstream/handle/1793/45742/SaloSerials.pdf?sequence=1
Automated Accessibility Analysis of PDFs…
Automated Accessibility Analysis of PDFs in Repositories : http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2010/07/30/automated-accessibility-analysis-of-pdfs-in%C2%A0repositories/
A sustainable future for open textbooks?…
A sustainable future for open textbooks? The Flat World Knowledge story :
« Many college students and their families are concerned about the high costs of textbooks. E–books have been proposed as one potential solution; open source textbooks have also been explored. A company called Flat World Knowledge produces and gives away open source textbooks in a way they believe to be financially sustainable. This article reports an initial study of the financial sustainability of the Flat World Knowledge open source textbook model. »
URL : http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2800/2578