Open Access and Scholarly Communication

In this sixty eight minute recording, I sit down with Paul Ginsparg, physicist, scholarly communications pioneer, and the latest recipient of the Paul Evan Peters Award.  We'll chat about the history of arXiv, social computing, peer review, and a number of  other topics related to scholarly communication. 


This interview is provided courtesy of CNI and was recorded at their 2006 Spring Task Force Meeting.  The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) is an organization dedicated to supporting the transformative promise of networked information technology for the advancement of scholarly communication and the enrichment of intellectual productivity.  You can learn more about CNI at their web site, http://www.cni.or

In this 23 minute recording, I'll sit down with Don Waters, Program Officer for Scholarly Communication at The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.  Among other things, we'll talk about broadly about their activities relating to digital library initiatives, Mellon's call for Urgent Action to Preserve Scholarly Electronic Journals, and the undercurrents of open access. 


This interview is provided courtesy of CNI and was recorded at their 2006 Spring Task Force Meeting.  The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) is an organization dedicated to supporting the transformative promise of networked information technology for the advancement of scholarly communication and the enrichment of intellectual productivity.  You can learn more about CNI at their web site, http://www.cni.org

The latest version of the Open Access Bibliography by Charles W. Bailey, Jr. is out.

The Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals provides an overview of open access concepts, and it presents over 1,300 selected English-language books, conference papers (including some digital video presentations), debates, editorials, e-prints, journal and magazine articles, news articles, technical reports, and other printed and electronic sources that are useful in understanding the open access movement's efforts to provide free access to and unfettered use of scholarly literature. Most sources have been published between 1999 and August 31, 2004; however, a limited number of key sources published prior to 1999 are also included. Where possible, links are provided to sources that are freely available on the Internet (approximately 78 percent of the bibliography's references have such links).

It's good to see key resources such as this being released under the CC licences

There are claims that the Royal Society, the original scientific scholarly society, have come out strongly against Open Access.

There are a number of stories, including boing boing and SciDevNet, but I'm personally not convinced that this story represents the considered opinion of the Royal Society as a whole. The issue is challenging for the Royal Society, because like many scholarly societies they currently derive a large portion of their income from selling journals to institutional libraries. On the other hand, open access can provide faster, cheaper and more transparent submission, peer review, publication and dissemination than printed journals or closed electronic journals.

Reading the summary of the Royal Society submission to the Research Councils UK Open Access consultation:

The Health Sciences and Human Services Library, University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB) and Johns Hopkins University (JHU) Libraries co-hosted a free forum on open access publishing, Ownership and Access in Scholarly Publishing.  View the webcast at the link below.

• http://www.openaccess.umaryland.edu/webcast.html