Please don't mix up the problem of University Course Packs with Open
Access Provision.
Universities have long-standing frustrations about what 3rd-party buy-in
content they can and cannot include in Course Packs for student use.
That's an old story, and universities should continue to strive to get
the best deal they can with AAP publishers for that, as Hofstra,
Marquette, and Syracuse Universities have been trying to do:
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/01/aap-pressures-universities-to-lim
it.html
But on no account should this unending saga be conflated with Open Access
(OA) provision (by those same three universities). Universities provide
OA to their own research output, by self-archiving it in their own OA
Institutional Repositories (IRs). That is 1st-party OA content.
The connection between the two is this: In its efforts to strike a deal
with AAP Publishers for their ("fair") use of 3rd-party content
(originating, say, from, Hofstra University), Marquette and Syracuse
need not worry about the content that they include in their course packs
that consists of links to Hofstra's OA articles, deposited in Hofstra's
OA IR. Nor vice versa. All they need do is link to it. And no need to
download, print or photocopy it for course packs. The link is enough,
and the students can do the rest (if they lack affection for trees).
And as Green OA self-archiving of 1st party content in authors' OA IRs
grows, the saga of struggling for 3rd party content will simply
shrink and disappear.
So, in keeping with the Golden Rule, universities should be mandating
Green OA self-archiving, alongside whatever deals they may be cutting
for fair use in course packs.
Stevan Harnad
AMERICAN SCIENTIST OPEN ACCESS FORUM:
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.h
tml
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/
UNIVERSITIES and RESEARCH FUNDERS:
If you have adopted or plan to adopt a policy of providing Open Access
to your own research article output, please describe your policy at:
http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/71-guid.html
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/136-guid.html
OPEN-ACCESS-PROVISION POLICY:
BOAI-1 ("Green"): Publish your article in a suitable toll-access journal
http://romeo.eprints.org/
OR
BOAI-2 ("Gold"): Publish your article in an open-access journal if/when
a suitable one exists.
http://www.doaj.org/
AND
in BOTH cases self-archive a supplementary version of your article
in your own institutional repository.
http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/
http://archives.eprints.org/
http://openaccess.eprints.org/
Received on Thu Jan 17 2008 - 19:14:10 GMT