Open Access (OA) literature is:
• online
• free of charge
• free of most copyright and licensing restrictions
"What makes it possible is the Internet
and the consent of the author or copyright-holder."
– OA Guru, Peter Suber
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What is OPEN ACCESS?
•2008-06-04 • Leave a CommentOA for Engineers
•2008-06-04 • Leave a CommentOPEN ACCESS JOURNALS FOR ENGINEERS:
CLICK ON SCREENSHOTS
NEW TITLES ARE ADDED WEEKLY
Freely accessible GreenFILE has scholarly and general interest titles, as well as government documents and reports on humans and ecology. 295,000 records and full text for more than 4600 Open Access articles.
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WELCOME!
•2008-06-04 • Leave a Comment
Q: What’s happening to the world’s bees?
•2008-06-04 • Leave a Comment
A: Who knows?
Some scientists suggest radiation from mobile phones as a possible cause for so-called “Colony Collapse Disorder” (CCD). Alternative theories range from global warming to pesticides to GM crops. Whatever the cause, CCD is yet another symptom of the massive mess we humans have created. Why is CCD important? As an article in the Belfast Telegraph stated, “Albert Einstein once said that if the bees disappeared, ‘man would have only four years of life left’.”
On Saturday, June 14, 2008, the Toronto Globe and Mail featured an article on the disappearance of amphibious life from our planet and said that amphibians “are going extinct faster than any other animals since the dinosaurs.”*
Global warming. Peak Oil. Mass extinction. Clear-cutting of the world’s remaining forests. The list of environmental issues we face at the dawn of the twenty-first century seems insurmountable. The Earth is rapidly approaching its ecological carrying capacity. It’s tempting to bury our heads in the sand and ignore the fate of our planet.
It is a time of crisis and opportunity. The crisis is obvious to most; the opportunity perhaps less so.
This is a blog about Open Access (OA) and what environmentalists—from all four corners of the planet—can do to ensure that the research they undertake is disseminated in an open and free manner. After all,
KNOWLEDGE WANTS TO BE FREE!
And now, more than ever, we have the opportunity to do something.
Thanks to the digital revolution, we can now, for the first time, have a truly “global conversation” about the problems we have created and how solve our environmental quagmire. I believe that the Internet has a special role to pay in the world’s environmental crisis. Solutions can only emerge from thinking and SHARING. As they say, two heads are better than one, and that’s what the Internet brings to the great conversation. Multiple viewpoints. Multiple research. Multiple Options.
I believe that, of all the disciplines that have found a new voice through Open Access, the environmental sciences can benefit the most.
OA has the potential to be the catalyst in our search for solutions. As a former environmentalist (I used to be the Development Director for Greenpeace Canada), I heartily embrace the OA movement; nothing could be timelier!
I hope that this endeavour—a project for my Master’s Degree in Library and Information Science—will stimulate you to think about the OA movement and how you, as an environmentalist, can participate in freeing knowledge. Together, we can do something!
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WELCOME TO
the open access environmentalist
A SUBJECT GUIDE
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update: lots has been written lately about CCC. Check these out:
About this Subject Guide
•2008-06-04 • 1 Comment
I have organized this Subect Guide into an FAQ format to make it easier for you to jump to the posts that most interest you. Perhaps you’ve never heard of OA (I hadn’t until last month!) and need some definitions. Part 1 of the Guide is a tutorial on the OA movement. It’s like I’m your best friend in oaclass and I’m sharing my best notes with you. I’m giving you what I’ve learned so far about Open Access. In this way, I feel I’m doing my small bit to add to the great conversation. Word-of-mouth is still the best form of advertising. Tell someone about OA. Pass the message on. Be an OA Advocate.
If you are already familiar with the basics of OA, feel free to jump right into the journals. Part 2 is the Directory of Open Access Journals’ listing of scholarly, peer-reviewed journals about our environment. All of these journals are breaking new ground just by being OA.
Anyway, fair reader, I hope this arrangement will save you time; time you can use to save the planet!
I’ve also sprinkled my blog with photos I’ve taken on my journeys. I want us to keep focused on our planet’s beauty as we search for solutions to the environmental problems we face.
This is a blog, so please feel free to leave your comments and suggestions. I’m learning, too, and appreciate your feedback.
Cheers!
Michael
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the open access environmentalist
A SUBJECT GUIDE IN FAQ FORMAT
PART 1: ABOUT OPEN ACCESS
Q: What’s happening to the world’s bees?
Q: What’s the definition of Open Access?
Q: If it’s a movement, do you have manifestos?
Q: Why now?
Q: What is the history of the control of scientific publishing?
Q: What are students doing to open access to research?
Q: What are my rights as an author?
Q: I’m a Canadian author. What should I do to protect my rights?
PART 2: OA JOURNALS FOR ENVIRONMENTALISTS
Q: How does the DOAJ categorize the environmental sciences?
Q: Which ECOLOGY journals are Open Access?
Q: Which ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES journals are Open Access?
Q: Which GEOGRAPHY journals are Open Access?
Q: Which GEOLOGY journals are Open Access?
Q: Which GEOPHYSICS AND GEOMAGNETISM journals are Open Access?
Q: Which METEOROLOGY AND CLIMATOLOGY journals are Open Access?
Q: Which OCEANOGRAPHY journals are Open Access?
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Q: What is Open Access?
•2008-06-04 • Leave a CommentA: Well, it’s a philosophy. It’s a movement. And like all good movements, it needs a logo.* Here are a few that I found:
A nice logo for OA from the German publisher GAP – German Academic Publishers. It’s simple, and it has our favourite colour, green.
Here’s one used by CERN. I’m not sure sure that having an “O” and an “A” locked inside a pyramid conveys the right tone for the movement.
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Here is another logo. I first came across this one while surfing Open Students. I’m not sure who designed it or where it came from (came you enlighten me, dear reader?)
I like this logo best; it’s reminiscent of the logos created by Creative Commons and, for me, best expresses the idea of unlocking knowledge.
I also rather like the Open Students’s mission statement:
And that, in a nutshell, is Open Access. A philosophy that science should be open, for everyone to learn. It’s a movement because, well, the time has come to unlock capitalist notions of profit and, instead, provide information for the greater good of all humanity. As an environmentalist, you should welcome this change to the dissemination of your knowledge. Read on and find out how you can become an OA Advocate.
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Q: What does “branding” mean in the academic journal publishing world?
A: According to Jean-Claude Guédon, “branding” in the STM (Science, Technology, Medicine) publishing world is all about attracting big-name scientists who act as citation lures, leading to an increased Impact Factor for that journal. A journal’s “Impact Factor” is related to the number of citations and visibility garnered by the journal. Guédon calls the Impact Factor of for-profit publishing a “big fraud.”
Q: Does the OA movement have a “brand” [logo] for itself? Have you seen other OA logos? Please leave a comment.
(Please help me out with this digression about logos; I’m into logos!).
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Q: What’s the definition of Open Access?
•2008-06-04 • Leave a CommentA: Here’s a very basic definition:
Open Access is literature that is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions (permissions).
Of course, like all definitions, there are shades of subtlety …
Peter Suber has written a slightly more detailed description, A Very Brief Introduction to Open Access. He has also written a not-so brief (but entirely manageable) overview called Open Access Overview for those who are new to the concept. These are key concepts: please take a look at them if they’re new to you.
CLICK ON THE SCREENSHOTS BELOW TO LEARN MORE
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Q: If it’s a movement, do you have manifestos?
•2008-06-04 • Leave a CommentA: Of course!
The OA movement is new, now! The term was coined in 2001 in Budapest, so much of what we call “OA” is “post Budapest.” It’s a Y2K-change-of-centuries movement. New century/New way of thinking about the Internet’s true potential as a two-way medium.
Defining exactly what OA is took some time, however. And, yes, we have manifestos. However, as the word “manifesto” seems so last century, we call them Initiatives, Statements, and Declarations (this moves them up-scale a wee bit). The movement’s “manifestos” are easy to remember: I present “The Three Bees”:
Budapest Bethesda Berlin
BUDAPEST
The first major Open Access definition resulted from a conference convened in Budapest by George Soros’s Open Society Institute on December 1–2, 2001. Called The Budapest Open Access Initiative, it was a defining moment for the fledgling movement. From this meeting came the first “manifesto”:
An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment, for the sake of inquiry and knowledge. The new technology is the internet. The public good they make possible is the world-wide electronic distribution of the peer-reviewed journal literature and completely free and unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds. Removing access barriers to this literature will accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge.
To achieve open access, two complementary strategies were recommended:
1. Self-Archiving, preferably conforming to standards created by the Open Archives Initiative
2. Open-Access Journals: “Because journal articles should be disseminated as widely as possible, these new journals will no longer invoke copyright to restrict access to and use of the material they publish.”
TO LEARN ABOUT THE BUDAPEST OPEN ACCESS INITIATIVE (BOAI), PLEASE CLICK ON THE BANNER BELOW:
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BETHESDA
The second initiative took place in Bethesda, MD, in 2003. This one-day meeting resulted in The Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing. Here are the contents of the Statement:
- Summary of the April 11 meeting
- Definition of open access publication
- Statement of the Institutions and Funding Agencies working group
- Statement of the Libraries & Publishers working group
- Statement of Scientists and Scientific Societies working group
- List of participants
Definition of Open Access Publication:
(from the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing)
An Open Access Publication1 is one that meets the following two conditions:
- The author(s) and copyright holder(s) grant(s) to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship2, as well as the right to make small numbers of printed copies for their personal use.
- A complete version of the work and all supplemental materials, including a copy of the permission as stated above, in a suitable standard electronic format is deposited immediately upon initial publication in at least one online repository that is supported by an academic institution, scholarly society, government agency, or other well-established organization that seeks to enable open access, unrestricted distribution, interoperability, and long-term archiving (for the biomedical sciences, PubMed Central is such a repository).
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1 Open access is a property of individual works, not necessarily journals or publishers.
2 Community standards, rather than copyright law, will continue to provide the mechanism for enforcement of proper attribution and responsible use of the published work, as they do now.
BERLIN
The Third major initiative was held in Berlin in 2003. Officially entitled the Conference on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities, the Berlin Declaration’s Preface states:
Preface
The Internet has fundamentally changed the practical and economic realities of distributing scientific knowledge and cultural heritage. For the first time ever, the Internet now offers the chance to constitute a global and interactive representation of human knowledge, including cultural heritage and the guarantee of worldwide access.
We, the undersigned, feel obliged to address the challenges of the Internet as an emerging functional medium for distributing knowledge. Obviously, these developments will be able to significantly modify the nature of scientific publishing as well as the existing system of quality assurance.
In accordance with the spirit of the Declaration of the Budapest Open Acess Initiative, the ECHO Charter and the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing, we have drafted the Berlin Declaration to promote the Internet as a functional instrument for a global scientific knowledge base and human reflection and to specify measures which research policy makers, research institutions, funding agencies, libraries, archives and museums need to consider.
TAKING A BREAK FROM FREEING INFORMATION AT BERLIN 1. SOURCE: Max Planck Digital Library
TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THE BERLIN DECLARATION, PLEASE CLICK ON THE BANNER BELOW:
| Berlin Declaration |
IF YOU’RE INTERESTED IN LEARNING ABOUT THE FOLLOW-UP CONFERENCES, PLEASE CLICK ON THE LINKS BELOW
BERLIN 3: SOUTHAMPTON February 2005
BERLIN 5: PADUA September 2007
BERLIN 6: DÜSSELDORF November 2008
IF YOU’RE A HISTORY BUFF INTERESTED IN LEARNING ABOUT ALL THINGS OA, PLEASE CLICK ON THE BANNER BELOW
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PETER SUBER’S TIMELINE OF THE OPEN ACCESS MOVEMENT
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WHAT’S NEXT?
Here’s a snippet from the Science Commons Weblog:
Berlin 6 conference: what’s next for open access
June 17th, 2008
Five years ago, the open access (OA) movement added the third “B” —Berlin — to the trio of international declarations supporting OA that nowfunction collectively to define it. This fall, organizers will hold the fifth follow-up conference, Berlin 6, to explore how the movement is progressing and where it’s headed, with sessions on topics close to our hearts here at Science Commons: the convergence of publishing and research, the relationship between open access and open standards, the “next-generation” implications of the OA movement and more. Among the speakers are arXiv.org founder Paul Ginsparg, open access luminary John Willinsky and Tony Hey, who leads Microsoft’s efforts to build long-term public-private partnerships with global scientific and engineering communities. You can find additional details, including the conference program and registration information, on the conference site.
The Berlin 6 conference is one of many events in the coming year that focus on what’s next for the OA movement, including our own free workshop on open science, which takes place next month in conjunction with ESOF 2008. Check out the ever-expanding list at the Open Access Directory (OAD) wiki, and if you have an event coming up that investigates open access, please add yours.
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Q: Why now?
•2008-06-04 • Leave a CommentA: Because we now have the ability to transmit knowledge globally in digital form! And why should we pay for knowledge? Frankly, the old STM publishing paradigm is a racket.
As John Willinsky writes in his book, The Access Principle:
While the publishing industry may have been the principal means of achieving journal quality and circulation during the age of print, its business model has been taken to the point at which, according to the leading research libraries, the scholarly community has no choice but to begin ‘‘declaring independence’’ (from corporate journal publishers) by seeking ways of ‘‘returning science to scientists.” The considerable difference in journal prices is bound to raise questions about the value of the services that publishers provide …
– Willinsky, The Access Principle, p. 76
And because knowledge shouldn’t only be for those who can afford to pay. Environmentalists need to participate in a great global conversation. Open Access can be the medium for this dialogue. According to Willinsky,
The World Health Organization found that at the close of the twentieth century, more than half the research and higher-education institutions in the lowest-income countries simply had no current subscriptions to international journals (Aronson 2004).
– Willinsky, The Access Principle, p. 94
IS THIS ANY WAY TO RUN OUR PLANET?
OPEN ACCESS IS ONE SOLUTION TO SOLVING THE ISSUES THAT FACE OUR GENERATION.
PERHAPS PART OF THE SOLUTION IS BREAKING DOWN TRADITIONAL NOTIONS OF GATEKEEPING:
On environmentalists, Willinsky has this to say:
Environmentalist groups provide a good example of personal-public interests in research that go beyond concerns with personal health issues. In his study of environmentalists, political scientist Frank Fischer was impressed with how interested these nonscientists were in research results regarding environmental issues, especially if the data were ‘‘presented and discussed in an open democratic process’’ (2000, 130). More than that, these same ‘‘ordinary’’ citizens have in recent times become actively involved in the research process itself, giving rise to, for example, ‘‘popular epidemiology,’’ in which the public helps to track the distribution of diseases, especially as this distribution might be related to environmental factors (151–157). To have a researcher-public alliance forming around environmental issues suggests one way in which both local and expert knowledge can play a critical part in what amounts to a deliberative process over what is to be done, for example, to reduce pollution. ‘‘Instead of questioning the citizen’s ability to participate, we must ask,’’ Fischer insists, ‘‘how can we interconnect and coordinate the different but inherently interdependent discourses of citizens and experts’’ (45). He calls for a reconstructed concept of professional practice among researchers whose task would then be about ‘‘authorizing space for critical discourse among competing knowledges, both theoretical and local, formal and informal’’ (27).
– Willinsky, The Access Principle, p. 119
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When Jean-Claude Guédon came to UBC to give our OA class a pep talk, I got quite upset thinking about the existing scientific publishing model. Here’s a scribble I made druring his lecture (notice the word VAMPIRES!):
In the centre of the big circle I should have drawn a huge $ symbol.
As a Canadian, I am particularly incensed about this money-go-round. Public (i.e. tax) money supports Canadian research institutes. We pay for professors’ salaries. We pay for their research facilities. Then our researchers have to pay journals to have their papers accepted! And then, the big SMT publishers have the gall to ask our university libraries to cough up huge bucks for copies of publicly-funded research. Seems weird to me. You? Open Access seems so sensible and fair by comparison.
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Q: Who is Peter Suber?
•2008-06-04 • Leave a CommentA: Mr. Suber is a key figure—arguably the the de facto leader—of the OA movement.
Check out his profile on Wikipedia and his personal website.
Wikipedia states: “He writes Open Access News and the SPARC Open Access Newsletter, considered the most authoritative blog and newsletter on open access.”
For a more detailed summary of the man and his mission, I highly recommend The Basement Interviews: Peter Suber, by Richard Poynder.
PETER SUBER AT THE BERLIN 4 CONFERENCE IN GOLM, GERMANY. SOURCE: Wikipedia
Here are a few snippets from Poynder’s profile of Suber:
INTRIGUED BY THE POTENTIAL OF THE WEB
In the mid 1990s, intrigued by the potential of the Web, Suber began to put his academic papers online. To his surprise, he immediately began to receive emails from other researchers wanting to discuss his ideas. This was just the kind of feedback that he had always expected to get by publishing in print, but which rarely materialised until his work was available online.
It is his objectivity and rationality above all that has seen Suber become the unofficial leader of the movement. His calm and inclusive approach has also proved the essential glue to hold together an often rowdy and rumbustious collection of highly-opinionated and disputatious individuals. For like most of the burgeoning free and open movements, the open access movement is constantly riven with disagreements and factional in-fighting, most notably between supporters of self-archiving (the so-called green road to open access), and those who insist that open access publishing (the gold road) is the best way forward.
And a quote from Poynder’s interview with Suber (well worth your time):
ON HOW “FREE ONLINE SCHOLARSHIP” BECAME “OPEN ACCESS”:
RP: The Budapest meeting is important in the history of the open access movement not just because it provided $3 million funding for open access projects, but because it was at that meeting that the term open access was coined. Tell me, in settling on the term open access was there much discussion about it? Prior to the Budapest Initiative, for instance, you had been using the term Free Online Scholarship. Why use Open Access rather than FOS?
PS: Clearly we needed a name for this thing that we were advocating. As you say, I had been using the term Free Online Scholarship, but I was the first to admit that it was long and cumbersome. So I could see that even though I had achieved a kind of brand identity for it, FOS wasn’t the best possible term and we wanted something better. Actually we had quite a lengthy discussion about it, and we were a little conflicted. On the one hand, we wanted a term that was short and simple, which Free Online Scholarship was not. On the other hand, we wanted a term that was self-explanatory, which open access is not. In the end, however, we decided that there was no term that was both these things.
RP: But eventually you settled for open access?
PS: Right. We decided to go with a short term and accompany it with a clear, public definition in order to minimise misunderstanding and stretching. We anticipated that misunderstanding and stretching might be problems, but we hoped that our definition would mitigate them.
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