Search Headquarters : Society : Issues : Intellectual Property : Free Access Theory

American Scientist Forum on Open Access
Forum devoted to the freeing of online access to the peer-reviewed research literature. Continuous since 1998.
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/september98-forum.html

Andrew Odlyzko: Papers on Electronic Publishing
A selection of papers on the future of electronic publication in the field of academic communication, its impact and consequences.
http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/eworld.html

Create Change
A resource for faculty and librarian action to reclaim scholarly communication. Main issues concern subscription prices for scholarly journals and help for journals willing to find publishing options better suited to their academic missions.
http://www.createchange.org/

Eprints.org
Dedicated to the freeing of the refereed research literature online through author/institution self-archiving. Provides free (GNU) software for self-archiving.
http://www.eprints.org/

First Monday - The Streetperformer Protocol & Digital Copyrights
Introducing the Street Performer Protocol, an electronic-commerce mechanism to facilitate the private financing of public works. Using this protocol, people would place donations in escrow, to be released to an author in the event that the promised work be put in the public domain.
http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue4_6/kelsey/

Free Online Scholarship Newsletter
(FOS) News and discussion on the migration of print scholarship to the internet and efforts to make it available to readers free of charge. Newsletter, forum, FAQ and a comprehensive directory on electronic archives.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/

Information Liberation
Examines radical alternatives for replacing mass media with network media, abolishing intellectual property, and changing social institutions that create a demand for surveillance. Free full text in html and pdf.
http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/pubs/98il/index.html

Nature Debates: E-Access
Online forum hosted by Nature Online concerning the impact of the web on the future of publishing and the dissemination of scientific information.
http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/index.html

Online or Invisible?
Article by Steve Lawrence appeared in Nature (2001) analyzing the citation rate of online and off line articles. Articles freely available online are more highly cited, free online availability substantially increases a paper's impact.
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/online-nature01/

Peter Suber's Guide to the FOS Movement
Comprehensive guide to the terminology, acronyms, initiatives, standards, technologies, and players in the free online scholarship initiative.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/guide.htm

Public Library of Science
A non-profit organization of scientists committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature freely accessible to scientists and to the public around the world. Promotion of free access online journals and eprints archives.
http://www.plos.org/

Rights Metadata for Open archiving
(RoMEO) A project funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee to investigate the rights issues surrounding the self-archiving of research in the UK academic community under the Open Archive Initiative's protocol for metadata harvesting (OAI). Legal issues, surveys, links to related discussions.
http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ls/disresearch/romeo/index.html

Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads: A Subversive Proposal for Electronic Publishing
An internet discussion about scientific and scholarly journals and their future.
http://www.arl.org/scomm/subversive/

Self-Archiving FAQ
Answers to frequently asked questions about self archiving including what and how. Has a "I worry about..." set of questions too with advice and answers to issues.
http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/

Stevan Harnad on Free Access Initiatives
How to free access to scientific literature: papers by one of the leaders of the open archives initiative.
http://cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/intpub.html

Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities
All of Germany's principal scientific and scholarly institutions, including the Max-Planck Society, as well as a growing number of their counterparts from other countries (such as France's CNRS) have signed their commitment to open access to scientific and scholarly research. (October 22, 2003)
http://www.zim.mpg.de/openaccess-berlin/berlindeclaration.html

Measure Calls for Wider Access to Federally Financed Research
A group challenging the power of established scientific journals says legislation will be introduced to make the results of all federally financed research available to the public. (June 26, 2003)
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/26/politics/26LIBR.html?ex=1057638190&ei=1&en=24bfe95d73754002

Creating a global knowledge network
Considerations on how to build a knowledge network for research communication and on its potential impact, by P. Ginsparg, one of the founders of ArXiv. (February 23, 2001)
http://lanl.arxiv.org/blurb/pg01unesco.html

Declaration of San José - Towards the Virtual Health Library
An initiative aiming to construct a digital medium 'as a unified response to our health situation, facilitating wide access to information for the permanent improvement of health of the people'. (March 24, 1998)
http://www.bireme.br/bvs/por/ideclar.htm