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****1/2 Open Access: Should scientific articles be available online and free to the public?
Amanda Schaffer' Medical Examiner column in Slate magazine on the topic of the public library of science. Highly recommended.
****1/2 Free Science Resource
A Free Science Info Site (mainly books, software, links)
****1/2 SourceForge - Science and Engineering
SourceForge is a web based service dedicated free hosting for opensource developers and their user base. Their site currently hosts over 90,000 open source projects which may be searched via multiple project parameters. Specific to the OpenScience focus, users can find over 7,000 projects under the science and engineering category.
**** The Public Library of Science
The Public Library of Science (PLoS) is a non-profit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource.
**** SPARC
SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, is an alliance of universities, research libraries, and organizations. The coalition was an initiative of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) started in 1997 to be a constructive response to market dysfunctions in the scholarly communication system. These dysfunctions have reduced dissemination of scholarship and crippled libraries. SPARC serves as a catalyst for action, helping to create systems that expand information dissemination and use in a networked digital environment while responding to the needs of academe. Leading academic organizations have endorsed SPARC.
**** Budapest Open Access Initiative
An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment, for the sake of inquiry and knowledge. The new technology is the internet. The public good they make possible is the world-wide electronic distribution of the peer-reviewed journal literature and completely free and unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds. Removing access barriers to this literature will accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge.
**** The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric Steven Raymond
The famous essay on the advantages of the open source development model.
**** Catalyzing Open Source development in science
Dan Gezelter's talk at the 1999 BNL open source/open science conference.
**** science commons
The mission of Science Commons is to encourage scientific innovation by making it easier for scientists, universities, and industries to use literature, data, and other scientific intellectual property and to share their knowledge with others. Science Commons works within current copyright and patent law to promote legal and technical mechanisms that remove barriers to sharing.
**** Open Source / Open Science
Coverage of the event from the Chronicle of Higher Education
**** Open Archives Initiative
The Open Archives Initiative develops and promotes interoperability standards that aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content. The Open Archives Initiative has its roots in an effort to enhance access to e-print archives as a means of increasing the availability of scholarly communication. Continued support of this work remains a cornerstone of the Open Archives program. The fundamental technological framework and standards that are developing to support this work are, however, independent of the both the type of content offered and the economic mechanisms surrounding that content, and promise to have much broader relevance in opening up access to a range of digital materials. As a result, the Open Archives Initiative is currently an organization and an effort explicitly in transition, and is committed to exploring and enabling this new and broader range of applications. As we gain greater knowledge of the scope of applicability of the underlying technology and standards being developed, and begin to understand the structure and culture of the various adopter communities, we expect that we will have to make continued evolutionary changes to both the mission and organization of the Open Archives Initiative.
**** Science Magazine's article on the NIH Public Access Policy
Elias Zerhouni covers the NIH Public Access Policy in this article in Science magazine
**** Center for the Study of the Public Domain
The public domain is the realm of materialideas, images, sounds, discoveries, facts, textsthat is unprotected by intellectual property rights and free for all to use or build upon. Our economy, culture and technology depend on a delicate balance between that which is, and is not, protected by exclusive intellectual property rights. Both the incentives provided by intellectual property and the freedom provided by the public domain are crucial to the balance. But most contemporary attention has gone to the realm of the protected. The Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke Law School is the first university center in the world devoted to the other side of the picture.
**** Homesteading the Noosphere by Eric Raymond
An excellent followup to "The Cathedral and the Bazaar". The hacker ethic as a gift economy.
**** Nature Magazine's Open Access Debate
The Internet is profoundly changing how scientists work and publish. New business models are being tested by publishers, including open access, in which the author pays and content is free to the user. This ongoing web focus will explore current trends and future possibilities. Each week, the website will publish specially commissioned insights and analysis from leading scientists, librarians, publishers and other stakeholders, as well as key links, and articles from our archive.
***1/2 myExperiment
myExperiment makes it easy to find, use and share scientific workflows and other Research Objects, and to build communities.
***1/2 BioMed Central
BioMed Central is an independent publishing house committed to providing immediate free access to peer-reviewed biomedical research All the original research articles in journals published by BioMed Central are immediately and permanently available online without charge or any other barriers to access. This commitment is based on the view that open access to research is central to rapid and efficient progress in science and that subscription-based access to research is hindering rather than helping scientific communication.
***1/2 Open Source / Open Science
Coverage of the Event from Dr. Dobbs Journal
***1/2 BIOS (Biological Innovation for Open Society)
The BIOS initiative will develop and validate a new means for the cooperative invention, improvement and delivery of biological technologies, drawing inspiration from the open source software movement to forge a 'protected commons' of knowledge and technology.
***1/2 PIPRA
The Public Intellectual Property Resource for Agriculture is an initiative by universities, foundations and non-profit research institutions to make agricultural technologies more easily available for development and distribution of subsistence crops for humanitarian purposes in the developing world and specialty crops in the developed world.
***1/2 NIH Public Access
An attempt by NIH to: 1) Create a stable archive of peer-reviewed research publications to ensure the permanent preservation of these vital research findings, 2) secure for NIH a searchable compendium of peer-reviewed research publications that the agency can use to manage its research portfolio and monitor scientific productivity, and 3) give the public better access to a time-delayed archive of published results of NIH-funded research.
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