Copyright Provisions in Law Journal Publ…

Copyright Provisions in Law Journal Publication Agreements :
Mr. Keele examined copyright provisions of law journal publication agreements and found that a minority of journals ask authors to transfer copyright. Most journals also permit authors to self-archive articles. He recommends journals make their agreements publicly available and use licenses instead of copyright transfers.
URL : http://eprints.rclis.org/18445/

Information Technology in Central Americ…

Information Technology in Central American Libraries :
The new technologies have revolutionized the field of Library and Information Sciences in the world. Currently it is expected that most libraries would have a presence on the Web and that also offer electronic catalogs to their patrons using Internet among other things. United States has been one of the engines of this changes followed by Europe but what happens in Central American libraries? This article provides a window to see what happens in the libraries of this region and their use of technology.
URL : http://eprints.rclis.org/18424/

The Digital Divide. Assessing Organisati…

The Digital Divide. Assessing Organisations’ Preparations for Digital Preservation :
Historically, information was recorded on paper, parchment and papyrus. Despite the apparent vulnerability of these materials, we can still read Egyptian scrolls, illuminated mediaeval manuscripts and early printed books today, hundreds or even thousands of years later. Nowadays, information is recorded digitally on hard drives, CDs and memory sticks. It has become much easier to produce, distribute and store information, and so there is more of it than ever before. It is ironic, though, that the more
information we produce, and the more we can hold in a given space, the shorter the time we seem to be able to keep hold of it for. Given that within decades storage media decay and computer hardware and software become obsolete, a word-processed document written twenty years ago may turn out to be more ephemeral than a text created in ancient Egypt more than 5,000 years ago.
This white paper is based on the findings of a Planets survey of two hundred organisations, mainly European archives and libraries, to investigate their digital preservation activities and
needs. It summarises the survey results, discusses key digital preservation topics, and highlights the steps needed to tackle the challenges of retaining access to our digital information in the medium and long term.

URL : http://www.planets-project.eu/docs/reports/planets-market-survey-white-paper.pdf

Open Access and Institutional Repositori…

Open Access and Institutional Repositories in Agricultural Sciences. The Case of Botswana College of Agriculture (BCA) :
The Internet hasmade it easy to create digital collections and make them readily accessible. Academic and research institutions in developing countries generate an enormous amount of information. Most of the information exists as grey literature and is often difficult to collect, store, preserve and make accessible to users. In addition, developing countries are facing barriers in access to scholarly information due to financial constraints. One way of overcoming these problems is to promote open access (OA) and institutional repositories (IR). OA and IRs are indispensable for academic and research institutions in developing countries because access to adequate, timely and relevant information is imperative to improve research and development in the agricultural sector. This paper explores OA and IRs from practical perspectives. It describes the Botswana College of Agriculture Library’s IR as a case study, including lessons learned in establishing and running the IR.
URL : http://journals.sfu.ca/iaald/index.php/aginfo/article/viewFile/127/94

Preserving Open Access Journals: A Liter…

Preserving Open Access Journals: A Literature Review :
This literature review addresses certain questions concerning the preservation of free, born-digital scholarly materials. It covers recent thinking on the current state of preservation efforts of born-digital materials; the range of actors involved in significant preservation initiatives of these artefacts; the perceived barriers preventing open access materials from benefiting from existing preservation efforts; initiatives that may enable local, small-scale preservation efforts to be undertaken; the challenges and opportunities posed to preservation by new models of scholarship such as open access datasets, reference sharing and annotation, collaborative authoring and community peer review. The review identifies representative international collaborative preservation initiatives, describes their goals and results, their specific preservation strategie, and their applicability to the preservation of born digital open access materials.
URL : http://eprints.rclis.org/18414/

THE GLOBAL DEVELOPMENT OF FREE ACCESS TO…

THE GLOBAL DEVELOPMENT OF FREE ACCESS TO LEGAL INFORMATION :
Since the mid1990s the Internet’s Worldwide Web has provided the necessary technical platform to enable free access to computerised legal information. Prior to the web there were many online legal information systems and numerous legal information products distributed on CD-ROM, but there was no significant provision of free access to legal information anywhere in the world. Both government and private sector online legal publishers charged for access. The web provided the key element required for free public access – a low cost distribution mechanism. For publishers it was close to a ‘no cost’ distribution mechanism if they were not required to pay for outgoing bandwidth. The ease of use of graphical browsers from around 1994, and the web’s use of hypertext as its principal access mechanism (at that time) meant that, the web provided a simple and relatively consistent means by which legal information could be both provided and accessed. This was an attractive alternative to the proprietary, expensive and training intensive search engines on which commercial online services largely relied. The development of free access Internet law services was based on these factors.
URL : http://ejlt.org//article/view/17/39

Free and open scholarship in the interne…

Free and open scholarship in the internet age :
Describes an action research project on scholarly communication in early stages. Research sites include the Open Access Journal Supports in Canada research team, E-LIS, the Open Archive for Library and Information, Scholarly and Research Communication (a new open access journal), and Stream, the SFU School of Communication graduate student open access journal. Methods include action research, economic and discourse analysis.
URL : http://eprints.rclis.org/18406/