[Foundation-l] Access to academic journals (was Re: Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser)

David Goodman dggenwp at gmail.com
Wed Mar 16 01:21:19 UTC 2011


I can't speak for all my colleagues in the oa movement, as they
disagree on almost every possible detail, and on almost every
consideration of strategy, but I think most people there would regard
"taxpayer access" both as a useful political slogan, and as a very
productive strategy—a manner of proceeding through government
regulation that can have a very wide and rapid effect--and that has
indeed had one.

For most of those in the movement, they do want all government
sponsored work to be either PD or CC:BY, and most would extent this to
all published journal literature whether directly government sponsored
or not.  But at this point, almost nobody considers a free license
like this  as really a practical first policy step, and all that is
actually considered necessary is read-only access.  Opinions differ
about whether this must be to the final published form of the
material. I think everyone involved regards the 6 or 12 month
delayed-access permitted by the current government mandates to be a
very unfortunate compromise, but necessary in order to get anything.

On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 5:16 PM, John Vandenberg <jayvdb at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 9, 2011 at 8:50 AM, Melissa Hagemann <MHagemann at sorosny.org> wrote:
>> ..
>> It would be wonderful if we could find a way for the WMF and OA
>> communities to more closely collaborate. Aubrey is right in that to a
>> large extent, OA is not well known outside the library community. Given
>> the reach of WMF, there seems that there must be a way to try to raise
>> greater awareness of the materials which are being made available
>> through OA.
>
> There is an ever-increasing number of Wikipedia articles about
> journals, and they mention open access in the infobox ;-)
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proceedings_of_the_National_Academy_of_Sciences
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:AJ
>
>> And if there is interest in advocating on this issue, SPARC developed
>> the Alliance for Taxpayer Access
>> (http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/action/index.shtml) which represents
>> universities, libraries, patient advocacy groups, and physicians working
>> to promote OA.
>
> I haven't heard of this before.
>
> The website/campaign name begs a lot of questions.
>
> "Why tax-payer access only?"
> "What copyright license allows for tax-payer only redistribution?"
>
> ;-)
>
> If I understand correctly, they are promoting unrestricted access to
> tax-payer funded research.  Do they explicitly want govt-funded
> research to be public domain, like US federal works are, and therefore
> accessible to everyone, in every country?
>
> --
> John Vandenberg
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>



-- 
David Goodman

DGG at the enWP
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:DGG
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG



More information about the foundation-l mailing list