|
COPYRIGHT 2008 Information Today, Inc.
I'M assuming you know what open access (OA) is--or at least you think you do. If not, this column isn't the best place to start. Peter Suber offers a good overview (www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview .htm)--it's 11 print pages long, but it links to a one-page "very brief introduction to open access." Here are the first and third paragraphs of that very brief introduction:
Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. What makes it possible is the internet and the consent of the author or copyright holder. OA is entirely compatible with peer review, and all the major OA initiatives for scientific and scholarly literature insist on its importance. Just as authors of journal articles donate their labor, so do most journal editors and referees participating in peer review.
I've been writing about OA for years, but within the context of library access to scholarship. That's because I'm personally less interested in whether scholarly articles are available in full-text form with no restrictions on reuse (other than attribution) than in finding ways for libraries to provide better access to more resources--a more complicated topic and one some OA advocates have no interest in pursuing.
COLORFUL CONFUSION
If you read much about OA, you'll encounter two colors. Green OA means depositing articles in online repositories that are harvestable using OAI protocols. Gold OA means the journal itself provides immediate full-text online access at no charge and with no restrictions other than attribution--the online version of the journal is funded by some means other than mandatory subscriptions.
One big reason OA isn't simple is those colors don't describe the entire rainbow of pseudo-OA variations (provisions that eventually make articles available but with embargoes or restrictions on further use or in ways that make data mining and reuse difficult). Some leading green OA advocates consider gold OA to be nothing but a distraction and argue that today's...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
