 |
 |
Subbiah, It may not help in this particular case, but here are three initiatives for developing countries. I notice that Taylor & Francis are participating in all three: http://www.oaresciences.org/en/ Online Access to Research in the Environment (OARE), an international public-private consortium coordinated by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Yale University, and leading science and technology publishers, enables developing countries to gain free access to one of the world's largest collections of environmental science literature. http://www.who.int/hinari/en/ The HINARI program, set up by WHO together with major publishers, enables developing countries to gain access to one of the world's largest collections of biomedical and health literature. Over 3503 journal titles are now available to health institutions in 113 countries, benefiting many thousands of health workers and researchers, and in turn, contributing to improved world health. http://www.aginternetwork.org/en/ The AGORA program, set up by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO) together with major publishers <http://www.aginternetwork.org/en/part.php> , enables developing countries to gain access to an outstanding digital library collection in the fields of food, agriculture, environmental science and related social sciences. AGORA provides a collection of 918 journals <http://www.aginternetwork.org/en/journals.php> to institutions in 107 countries. AGORA is designed to enhance the scholarship of the many thousands of students, faculty and researchers in agriculture and life sciences in the developing world. There's also INASP http://www.inasp.info/ Who have several projects: http://www.inasp.info/projects/ Our mission is to enable worldwide access to information and knowledge with particular emphasis on the needs of developing and transitional countries. We work with partners and networks around the world to encourage the creation and production of information, to promote sustainable and equitable access to information, to foster collaboration and networking, and to strengthen local capacities to manage and use information and knowledge. Roddy MacLeod ________________________________ From: Repositories discussion list [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Subbiah Arunachalam Sent: 7 December 2006 12:45 To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Journals, copyright and open access archiving Friends: Here is a message I received from another list. It tells you about the difficulties faced by developing country librarians who want to bring the complete works of great scientists into public domain through open access repositories. Surprisingly, some publishers - in this case Taylor & Francis - are unwilling to grant permission to place papers published in their journals several decades ago in an institutional open access archive. While one may find a way out and get these papers accessible to anyone who wants to read them, the true face of such publishers are exposed by such incidents. ----- Dear all, We are very keen to make open access not only the papers of C.V. Raman but also any other articles/talks by him or on him. We have already made available on our digital repository the newspaper clippings on him. All the 6 volumes of his collected papers have been scanned and we have the pdf files ready. Now only the publishers permission is needed to make them open access. We have written to all of them but getting all their permission is not assured. Already Taylor & Francis have declined to give permission to make their articles open access. Publisher's copyright policies may in fact be the biggest barrier to making this entire collection open access. However, the Indian Academy of Sciences and the American Physical Society have given us permission to begin with. Our plan in these circumstances is to make articles open access wherever permission is clearly given and to make the rest restricted access. At least the metadata will then be freely available for all. Anyone interested can email us for a copy. I am sure that those who have established repositories are facing similar problems. But we are doing our best. With best wishes, Girija Srinivasan Raman Research Institute Library, Tel:+91 80 2361 0122 / Extn 250 --------- For those of you who may not know Sir C V Raman, he was a leading physicist of his generation and the only Indian to have won a science Nobel Prize. [Prof. Amartya Sen won in Economics, and Mother Teresa for Peace. Prof. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar and Prof. Har Gobind Khorana were US citizens when they won the Nobel Prize.] Prof. Raman was Director of the Indian Institute of Science, Founder-Director of the Raman Research Institute and the Founder-President of the Indian Academy of Sciences. He passed away in November 1970 at the age of 82. Scientists should refrain from signing publishers' agreements without reading them carefully. They should never surrender copyright to their creative works - resaerch papers. Many journals agree to make changes in the standard copyright transfer form they use. Over 90% of about 9,000 journals surveyed allow archiving of papers published in them. The rest of the journals should be persuaded to fall in line, and if they refuse scientists around the world should boycott them - they shoud refrain from publishing in them, should not act as referees for those journals and should not be members of their editorial boards. As most research is performed with public support - research grants from governments and other donors - it is not proper on the part of researchers to sign away copyright to journal publishers. One can only give first (or even exclusive) right to publish the papers. Authors and their institutions should retain all rights to use the material subsequently in whatever way they want to. If journals can claim copyright to articles simply because they publish, should not the funding agencies claim copyright to work produced with their money and should not the authors retain the copyright simply because the paper is their creative work? Subbiah Arunachalam