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

[John Vandenberg]

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