HISTOR¥

Recently a few organizations published their 'Copyright Amendment Form' for academic authors. If you are confronted with publishers that are ever more inventive when it comes to securing their exclusive rights, you know why you may need such documents.

Here are the ones by Creative Commons:

• OpenAccess-CreativeCommons 1.0 Addendum
• OpenAccess-Publish 1.0 Addendum
• OpenAccess-Delay 1.0 Addendum

Found through Peter Subers OAN: Charles Bailey wrote Strong Copyright + DRM + Weak Net Neutrality = Digital Dystopia? (in .pdf). An excerpt (from its conclusion):

What this paper has said is simply this: three issues -a dramatic expansion of the scope, duration, and punitive nature of copyright laws; the ability of DRM to lock-down content in an unprecedented fashion; and the erosion of Net neutrality- bear careful scrutiny by those who believe that the Internet has

Paul G. Haschak, "Reshaping the World of Scholarly Communication—Open Access and the Free Online Scholarship Movement: Open Access Statements, Proposals, Declarations, Principles, Strategies, Organizations, Projects, Campaigns, Initiatives, and Related Items — A Webliography", Electronic Journal of Academic and Special Librarianship vol.7 no.1 (Spring 2006). An excerpt:

Since World War II, we have seen a proliferation of scholarly materials. In particular, there has been a tremendous growth in the size and cost of the primary journal literature.

This week's edition of The Economist contains a large survey on the societal impact of the new media: check Among the Audience; Audio Interviews...

This is an interesting post on the relationship and (in)compatibilities of open content and open source:

It is tempting to think that references to "open content" have a meaning similar to those for "open source". It is equally tempting to want to make use of 'open content' in an open source project. Do not yield to temptation! (...) The common characteristic of "open content" licences is a fixation on exclusionary (or discriminatory) peer distribution, in preference to that of inclusionary (or non discriminatory) peer production.

Restyling Histor¥ had caused several site-internal links to become broke; I have fixed this problem today.

Steven Harnad wrote a fine paper in favor of the the OA-model of research and publishing. The abstract:

Open Access (OA) means free access for all would-be users webwide to all articles published in all peer-reviewed research journals across all scholarly and scientific disciplines. 100% OA is optimal for research, researchers, their institutions, and their funders because it maximizes research access and usage. It is also 100% feasible: authors just need to deposit ("self-archive") their articles on their own institutional websites.

Also to be followed: Glyn Moody wrote a short but valuable article on the similarities and differences between the Open Source and Open Access movements. An excerpt:

The growing success of free software has led to a widening of the culture clash between "open" and "closed" to include other domains. One recent skirmish, for example, concerned a particularly important kind of digital code – the sequence of the human genome – and whether it would be proprietary, owned by companies like Celera, or freely available. Openness prevailed, but in another arena – scholarly publishing – advocates of free (as in both beer and freedom) online access to research papers are still fighting the battles that open source won years ago. At stake is nothing less than control of academia's treasure-house of knowledge.

The parallels between this movement - what has come to be known as “open access” – and open source are striking. For both, the ultimate wellspring is the Internet, and the new economics of sharing that it enabled. Just as the early code for the Internet was a kind of proto-open source, so the early documentation – the RFCs – offered an example of proto-open access. And for both their practitioners, it is recognition – not recompense – that drives them to participate.

I believe this is one of the most important recent developments in the field of economics: Theoretical Economics -An open-access journal in economic theory proves that there is more to contemporary economics than reducing all social reality to the product of monetary incentives. From their editorial statement:

Open Access enables authors to obtain the maximum possible exposure for their work. Freely available papers are read more, cited more, and have more impact than ones available only to paid subscribers. As an experiment, enter a research topic into a search engine like Google and see how many links you obtain to papers published in traditional journals. You will find that most references are to working papers, not to published papers, because working papers are freely available.

The advent of the web has made free dissemination of research feasible and financially viable. Because existing specialty journals obtain revenues from selling subscriptions, primarily to libraries, access to the research they publish is limited. The attractive revenue stream that such subscriptions provide makes it unlikely that these journals will convert to Open Access. Thus a need exists for new refereed Open Access journals to replace existing journals. We believe that the establishment of a major Open Access journal in economic theory will lead others to establish Open Access journals for other fields of economics, reclaiming full control for the profession of its research output. We hope that this will lead the profession to a new norm in which all research is freely available.

I haven't been blogging for quite a while, but it all has to do with the restyling of the Histor¥-page. Thanks to Hans Coppens for taking this weblog into 2006! It will be a year full of Open Access news, Japanese financial history matters and else. I also thank all the Histor¥-readers for their patience and support.