Happy Birthday, Open Access Directory!

The Open Access Directory is now 6 months old - Happy Birthday, OAD!

As noted on the OAD website, We have grown from six lists to thirty-four, which shows the strength and passion of the OA community.

INTERACTIVE MARKETING SESSION TO BE FEATURED AT SPARC DIGITAL REPOSITORIES MEETING

For immediate release
October 28, 2008

For more information, contact:
Jennifer McLennan
(202) 296-2296 ext 121
jennifer@arl.org

INTERACTIVE MARKETING SESSION TO BE FEATURED
AT SPARC DIGITAL REPOSITORIES MEETING

Last Chance to Register and Book Hotel at Reduced Rates

Washington, DC – Oct. 28, 2008 – At the upcoming SPARC Digital Repositories Meeting, branding strategist Nicole Colovos will lead a module dedicated to addressing one of the most compelling questions of digital repository management: How do we grow our content? The SPARC Digital Repositories Meeting 2008 will be held November 17-18 at the Renaissance Harborplace Hotel in Baltimore, USA.

This “Marketing Practicum” will introduce key marketing principles and strategies for the academic context. Participants will have a hands-on opportunity to apply these in an exercise aimed at engaging campus constituencies and demonstrating the importance of digital repositories. They will examine the research and publishing process from a variety of perspectives and be challenged to introduce repositories in ways that clearly communicate their benefits and opportunities to wide-ranging constituencies.

Colovos is the Vice President of Strategic Development for Bremmer & Goris Communications, the Alexandria-based marketing and design firm whose clients have included Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, University at Buffalo, and the Council on Library and Information Resources. The firm has been instrumental in developing recent SPARC educational campaigns, including “The Right to Research: The student guide to opening access to research” and the Sparky video awards.

The Marketing Practicum will be on Tuesday, Nov. 18, following the luncheon keynote address by Bob Witeck, CEO of Witeck-Combs Communications, who will offer his unique insights on targeted message development. One-day registration rates are available.

Advance registration fees for the SPARC Digital Repositories Meeting 2008 expire Oct. 31, after which higher on-site rates apply. Hotel reservations must be made by Nov. 1 to obtain the discounted conference rate. To register and for more details, visit the meeting Web site at http://www.arl.org/sparc/ir08.

The SPARC Digital Repositories Meeting is supported by major contributions from Microsoft (Conference Sponsor); Berkeley Electronic Press, BioMed Central, DC Lab, and EPrints, (breakfast and luncheon Sponsors); and by additional contributions from seventeen coffee break and supporting sponsors.

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SPARC

SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), with SPARC Europe and SPARC Japan, is an international alliance of more than 800 academic and research libraries working to create a more open system of scholarly communication. SPARC’s advocacy, educational and publisher partnership programs encourage expanded dissemination of research. SPARC is on the Web at http://www.arl.org/sparc.

The SPARC Digital Repositories Meeting program has been developed by the members of the 2008 Program Committee: Jun Adachi (SPARC Japan), Raym Crow (SPARC), Richard Fyffe (Grinnell College), Susan Gibbons (University of Rochester), Melissa Hagemann (Open Society Institute), Karla Hahn (Association of Research Libraries), Bill Hubbard (SHERPA), Rick Johnson (SPARC), Michelle Kimpton (DSpace Foundation), Norbert Lossau (Goettingen State and University Library and DRIVER), Joyce Ogburn (University of Utah), Terry Owen (University of Maryland, College Park), Kathleen Shearer (Canadian Association of Research Libraries), Alma Swan (Key Perspectives Ltd.), Sean Thomas (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Susan Veldsman (eIFL), and Charles Watkinson (The American School of Classical Studies at Athens).



Jennifer McLennan
Director of Communications
SPARC
(The Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition)
http://www.arl.org/sparc

ELPUB 2009 - First Call for Papers

ELPUB 2009 - First Call for Papers
Rethinking Electronic Publishing : Innovation in Communication Paradigms and Technologies
13th International Conference on Electronic Publishing

10 - 12 June 2009, Milan, Italy
http://www.elpub.net

Electronic publishing via the Internet is continuously changing its shapes and models, challenging traditional players to adapt to new contexts. Innovative technologies enable individuals, scholars, communities and networks to establish contacts, exchange data, produce information, share knowledge. Open access sources and commercial players make contents available for a heterogeneous audience in diversity of environments, from business to private life, from educational and cultural activities to leisure time, and in a large variety of devices, from personal computers to mobile media.

New opportunities and new needs challenge us to rethink electronic publishing, to innovate communication paradigms and technologies, to make information not just a flat equivalent of a paper but a truly digital format, to allow machine processing and new services, to face the future of mobile life. The ELPUB 2009 conference will focus on key issues in e-communications, exploring dissemination channels, business models, technologies, methods and concepts.

We welcome a wide variety of papers from members of the communities whose research and experiments are transforming the nature of electronic publishing and scholarly communications. Topics include but are not restricted to:

- New publishing models, tools, services and roles
- New scholarly constructs and discourse methods
- Innovative business models for scholarly publishing
- Mobile distribution of e-contents, e-books
- M2M publishing services
- Multilingual and multimodal interfaces
- Services and technology for specific user communities, media, and content
- Content search, analysis and retrieval
- Interoperability, scalability and middleware infrastructure to facilitate awareness and discovery
- Personalization technologies (e.g. social tagging, folksonomies, RSS)
- Semantic web, metadata, information granularity, digital objects
- Data mining, text harvesting, dynamic formatting
- Knowledge linking, discovery, presentation
- User generated contents
- Usage and citation impact
- Security, privacy and copyright issues
- Digital preservation, content authentication
- Recommendations, guidelines, interoperability standards

Author Guidelines

Contributions are invited for the following categories:
– Single paper (abstract minimum of 1,000 and maximum of 1,500 words)
– Tutorial (abstract min. of 500 and max. of 1,000 words)
– Workshop (abstract min. of 500 and max. of 1,000 words)
– Poster (abstract max of 500 words)
– Demonstration (abstract max of 500 words)

See website for detailed author instructions: http://www.elpub.net.

Key Dates:
November 15th 2008: Opening of submission of abstracts.
January 15th 2009: Deadline for submission of abstracts (in all categories).
February 23rd, 2009: Notification of acceptance of submitted proposals.
April 6th, 2009: Deadline for submission of final papers.

All submissions are subject to peer review (double-blind) and accepted by the international ELPUB Programme Committee. Accepted full papers will be published in the conference proceedings. Printed proceedings are distributed during the conference. Electronic versions of the contributions will be archived at: http://elpub.scix.net

ABOUT ELPUB
The ELPUB 2009 conference will keep the tradition of the previous international conferences on electronic publishing, held in the United Kingdom (in 1997 and 2001), Hungary (1998), Sweden (1999), Russia (2000), the Czech Republic (2002), Portugal (2003), Brazil (2004), Belgium (2005), Bulgaria (2006), Austria (2007) and Canada (2008), which is to bring together researchers, lecturers, librarians, developers, business executives, entrepreneurs, managers, users and all those interested in issues regarding electronic publishing in a wide variety of contexts. These include the human, cultural, economic, social, technological, legal, commercial, and other relevant aspects that such an exciting theme encompasses.
Three distinguishing features of this conference are: broad scope of topics which creates a unique atmosphere of active exchange and learning about various aspects of scholarly communications and electronic publishing; combination of general and technical issues; and a condensed procedure of submission, revision and publication of proceedings which guarantees presentations of most recent work.
ELPUB 2009 will offer a variety of activities, such as workshops, tutorials, panel debates, poster presentations and demonstrations. Social events and sight-seeing tours will also be available to participants (at additional costs). Please see the conference web site for details.

Conference Location: Milan, Italy. Milan is the largest metropolitan area in Italy, one of the largest in Europe: 7,4 million population. It is the Italian capital of industry and business and well renowned as one of the world capitals of fashion and design. Milan is one of the oldest artistic centres in Northern Italy and its surroundings include the beautiful Alps and the famous Garda, Maggiore and Como lakes. All this makes Milan a perfect place for sight-seeing, cultural visits and exciting shopping, not to mention enjoying Italian food and wines.

Conference Host: The State University of Milan is the third largest university in Italy after Rome and Naples. The venue is the main building, in the centre of Milan, 3 minutes on foot from the Cathedral. It was made in 1450 under Duke Francesco Sforza, who also built the famous Castle. ELPUB 2009 is organized by CILEA, a consortium of Italian Universities founded in 1974 to promote the use of advanced ICT in academic and research environments, to support technological transfer and to manage ICT services, facilities and infrastructures. Within CILEA, the AePIC team deals with innovative e-publishing technologies and models, promoting Open Access to knowledge through sustainable online publishing.

General Chair: Susanna Mornati, CILEA – Inter-Academic Consortium for ICT, Segrate, Italy - mornati@cilea.it

Programme Chair: Turid Hedlund, Hanken School of Economics, Helsinki, Finland - turid.hedlund@hanken.fi

Conference information: elpub2009@elpub.net

Conference web site: http://www.elpub.net

Join the "ELPUB Electronic Publishing Conference" group on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=36376184362

Heather Morrison
ELPUB Programme Committee



Charles Bailey: Authors' Rights Tout de Suite

Many thanks to Charles Bailey for yet another useful tool!

Charles Bailey's announcement:

Author's Rights, Tout de Suite, the latest Digital Scholarship publication, is designed to give journal article authors a quick introduction to key aspects of author's rights and to foster further exploration of this topic through liberal use of relevant references to online documents and links to pertinent Web sites.


http://www.digital-scholarship.org/ts/authorrights.pdf

It is under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License, and it can be freely used for any noncommercial purpose, including derivative works, in
accordance with the license.


http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/

The prior publication in the Tout de Suite series, Institutional Repositories, Tout de Suite, is also available.


http://www.digital-scholarship.org/ts/irtoutsuite.pdf

Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association Launches

ANNOUNCING THE LAUNCH OF THE OPEN ACCESS SCHOLARLY PUBLISHERS ASSOCIATION, OASPA

14 October 2008, London. The Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, OASPA, announces its official launch today in conjunction with an OA Day celebration hosted by the Wellcome Trust in London. The mission of OASPA is to support and represent the interests of Open Access (OA) journals publishers globally in all scientific, technical, and scholarly disciplines through an exchange of information, setting of industry standards, advancing business and publishing models, advocating for gold OA journals publishing, education and the promotion of innovation.

From having first emerged as a new publishing model over a decade ago, OA publishing has become an embedded feature of the scholarly publishing landscape: The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) lists over 3500 peer-reviewed journals; a growing number of professional organizations offer OA publications; university libraries increasingly support OA publishing services; funding organizations support and encourage OA publishing; and a long tail of independent editorial teams and societies now publish their titles OA. Professional OA publishers such as BioMed Central and the Public Library of Science (PLoS) have been in business for over five years, while some scientist/scholar publishers (editorial teams operating independently of a professional publisher) have published their OA journals for a decade or more. Moreover, a number of traditional publishing houses are now engaging in Open Access activities, the recent acquisition of BioMed Central by Springer and the SAGE-Hindawi partnership being two cases in point. By bringing together those who share an interest in developing appropriate business models, tools and standards to support OA journals publishing, it is hoped that success in these areas can be achieved more quickly to the benefit of not only OASPA members, but more importantly, for the scholarly community that OA publishers serve.

Membership in OASPA is open to both scholar publishers and professional publishing organizations, including university presses and for profit and non-profit organizations. Members are expected to demonstrate a genuine interest in OA journals publishing by having signed either the Berlin or Budapest Declarations and must publish at least one full OA journal. Other individuals and organizations who support OA journals publishing or who are interested in exploring opportunities are also welcome. Membership criteria and an application form can be found on the OASPA website, www.oaspa.org.

The founding members of OASPA represent a broad spectrum of OA publishers and include: BioMed Central, Co-Action Publishing, Copernicus, Hindawi Publishing Corporation, Journal of Medical Internet Research (Gunther Eysenbach), Medical Education Online (David Solomon), the Public Library of Science (PLoS), SAGE, SPARC Europe and Utrecht University Library (Igitur). Representatives from each of these publishers will form an interim board until a first General Meeting is held during 2009.

###

Open Access Scholarly Publishers’ Association, OASPA, is launched today 14 October 2008 in response to long-time informal discussions among Open Access publishers, and aims to represent the interests of OA journals publishers globally. For more information about the organization, visit the OASPA website at: www.oaspa.org.

The Wellcome Trust is the largest charity in the UK. It funds innovative biomedical research, in the UK and internationally, spending over £600 million each year to support the brightest scientists with the best ideas. The Wellcome Trust supports public debate about biomedical research and its impact on health and wellbeing.

Open Access (OA) scholarly publication refers to the dissemination of peer-reviewed manuscripts containing original research or scholarship immediately upon publication, at no charge to user groups, without requiring registration or other restrictions to access. OA publications also allow users to "copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship...."

(From the SPARC Open Access Forum

Happy Open Access Day!

Follow the events on the Open Access Day website!

In the Library with a Lead Pipe

Check it out! A new open access, peer-reviewed blog by librarians, called In the Library with a Lead Pipe.

Thanks to Peter Suber on Open Access News.

October 2008 SPARC Open Access Newsletter

Peter Suber has just released the October 2008 SPARC Open Access Newsletter. Highlighted this month: an attempt to overturn the NIH policy with a bill that makes the ludicrous claim that copyright in published results of publicly funded research belongs to the publishers.

If publishers make a little money from publishing the results of publicly funded research, that's fine - as long as this does not interfere with the purpose of funding the research. In medicine, the purpose is advancing our understanding so that we can prevent, cure, and treat illnesses.

This is a topic I've written about in more depth in my open letter to the American Association of Cancer Research, In lieu of flowers.

First Open Access Day to be held on October 14th

SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), the Public Library of Science (PLoS), and Students for FreeCulture have jointly announced the first international Open Access Day. Open Access Day will create a key opportunity for the higher education community and the general public to understand more clearly the opportunities of wider access and use of content.

The First Open Access Day will invite researchers, educators, librarians, students, and the public to participate in live, worldwide broadcasts of events. In North America, events will be held at 7:00 PM (Eastern) and 7:00 PM (Pacific) and feature appearances from:

• Sir Richard Roberts, Ph.D., F.R.S.
  Joint winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1993 for discovering split genes and RNA splicing and one of 26 Nobel Prize-winners to sign the Open Letter to U.S. Congress in support of taxpayer access to publicly funded research, and currently at New England Biolabs, USA. [broadcast: 7PM Eastern]



• Philip E. Bourne, Ph.D.
  Philip E. Bourne is the Founding Editor-in-Chief of PLoS Computational Biology and the author of the popular PLoS Computational Biology Ten Simple Rules Series. He is Professor in the Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of California San Diego, Associate Director of the RCSB Protein Data Bank, Senior Advisor to the San Diego Supercomputer Center, an Adjunct Professor at the Burnham Institute, and Co-Founder of SciVee. [broadcast: 7PM Pacific]

The event will also mark the launch of the new “Voices of Open Access Video Series.” Key members of the research community, including a teacher, librarian, researcher, student, patient advocate, and a funder, will speak on why they are committed to Open Access.

For details and to participate, visit: http://www.openaccessday.org/

SECOND INTERNATIONAL PKP SCHOLARLY PUBLISHING CONFERENCE July 8-10, Vancouver, British Columbia: Preliminary Announcement and Call for Papers

Quick link to 2nd International PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference Website:
http://pkp.sfu.ca/ocs/pkp/index.php/pkp2009

SECOND INTERNATIONAL PKP SCHOLARLY PUBLISHING CONFERENCE
PRELIMINARY ANNOUNCEMENT

The Public Knowledge Project is pleased to announce that the second international PKP conference will be held from July 8 – 10, 2009 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The first PKP conference was an overwhelming success with presentations and participants from around the world. A selected set of conference papers was subsequently published in the October 2007 issue of First Monday.

The conference will appeal not just to members of the PKP community, but to anyone interested in trends and developments for scholarly publishing and communication. There will be a wide range of topical sessions on new reading and publishing technologies; open access initiatives; alternative publishing and funding models; national and international collaborative projects; new roles and partnerships for libraries, scholarly publishers and others; and sustainability for open access publishing and open source software. Prospective and first time users of OJS and other PKP software will be able to learn more about the systems and establish contacts with the PKP community. Experienced implementers, developers, and system administrators will have an opportunity to participate in technical sessions and exchange information.

The conference will commence with an opening keynote session on the evening of July 8 convened by John Willinsky, the founder of the Public Knowledge Project. There will be several pre-conference workshops on July 8, and the main conference program will present a combination of concurrent and single track sessions during on July 9 and 10. The conference will conclude with three special symposia on community and network building intended for each of the core PKP constituents: journal editors and publishers; librarians; and software developers.

The conference will be hosted at Simon Fraser University’s downtown campus and will be adjacent to a wide range of accommodations, restaurants, and other popular tourist destinations. Please mark the July 8 – 10 dates on your 2009 calendars. The PKP partners look forward to welcoming you to the second PKP conference.
Session proposals will be accepted until January 15, 2009 and conference registration opens October 15, 2008. For more information, please visit the conference web site: http://pkp.sfu.ca/ocs/pkp/index.php/pkp2009

The Public Knowledge Project is a federally funded research initiative at Simon Fraser University, Stanford University, and the University of British Columbia. It seeks to improve the scholarly and public quality of academic research through the development of innovative online environments. PKP has developed free, open source software for the management, publishing, and indexing of journals and current conferences. The PKP software suite is comprised of three modules in production: Open Archives Harvester, Open Journal Systems, and Open Conference Systems, and two in development: Lemon8-XML and Open Monograph Press.

CALL FOR PAPERS

The Public Knowledge Project is pleased to announce that the second international PKP conference will be held from July 8 – 10, 2009 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The first PKP conference was an overwhelming success with presentations and participants from around the world. A selected set of conference papers was subsequently published in the October 2007 issue of First Monday.

The conference will consist of a mixture of plenary talks and parallel conference streams intended for the following groups:

- journal editors and publishers
- researchers in scholarly publishing
- librarians and information specialists
- open source software developers and system administrators

Papers and presentation proposals that address one or more of the following topics are especially encouraged:

- New reading and publishing technologies, e.g. integration of Web 2.0 features;
- Open access initiatives;
- Alternative publishing and funding models;
- National and international collaborative projects;
- New roles and partnerships for libraries, scholarly publishers, and others;
- Sustainability for open access publishing and open source software.

Parallel sessions will each be up to 1 hour in length. They may consist of a workshop, a case study, a research report, a set of 3 presentations on a single theme, a panel discussion as well as other options.

Proposals for papers or presentations should be submitted by January 15, 2009, using the submission guidelines and form available at http://pkp.sfu.ca/ocs/pkp/index.php/pkp2009/

The conference will be hosted at Simon Fraser University’s downtown campus and will be adjacent to a wide range of accommodations, restaurants, and other popular tourist destinations. Please mark the July 8 – 10 dates on your 2009 calendars. The PKP partners look forward to welcoming you to the second PKP conference.

The Public Knowledge Project is a federally funded research initiative at Simon Fraser University, Stanford University, and the University of British Columbia. The partnership brings together faculty members, librarians, and graduate students dedicated to exploring whether and how new technologies can be used to improve the professional and public value of scholarly research. Its research program is investigating the social, economic, and technical issues entailed in the use of online infrastructure and knowledge management strategies to improve both the scholarly quality and public accessibility and coherence of this body of knowledge in a sustainable and globally accessible form. It seeks to improve the scholarly and public quality of academic research through the development of innovative online environments. It continues to be an active player in the open access movement, as it provides the leading open source software for journal and conference management and publishing. The research and publishing activities of the project have been reviewed and cited in Inside Higher Ed, Nature, New England Journal of Medicine, Science, The Scientist and others.

PubMed Central Canada (PMC Canada) initiative

Over the summer, NRC-CISTI and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) finalized the first step in the partnership for the PubMed Central Canada agreement process, a national digital repository of peer-reviewed health science research. With CIHR funding now in place, CISTI plans to contribute its technological expertise to build & host the infrastructure and manage & develop the e-repository.

Before this can go forward, however, the second and final step of the agreement process must be completed. That would be for CISTI and CIHR to jointly approach the US National Library Medicine to co-sponsor the service, as a mirror site to PubMed Central therefore obtaining a 3-way agreement between CISTI, CIHR and the US National Library of Medicine to ‘officially’ enter into the PubMed Central International (PMCI) network. Once the final agreement is in place, development will begin on the first phase of PMC Canada thus enabling CIHR researchers to deposit their publications into PubMed Central.

As the process unfolds, the initiative’s progress and latest developments will be published on CISTI’s Partnership Development Office website and in CISTI News, CISTI’s quarterly newsletter on events and happenings at CISTI.

Thanks to Donna Meighan, Partnership Development Officer, Health Portfolio, NRC. Email: Donna.Meighan@nrc-cnrc.gc.ca

Thinking about Prestige, Quality, and Open Access

Here is a great article to send to faculty and university administrators! Peter Suber's Thinking about Prestige, Quality, and Open Access covers in some depth the reasons TA journals are so entrenched, even in comparison with newer OA journals of equal (or better) quality - and some thoughts on what can be done about this. For example, university hiring procedures could either focus on quality instead of surrogates such as the impact factors of journals faculty have published in, or, at the very least, at some of the newer surrogate measures that don't oversimplify as much as IF.

My own comments on this topic are posted on The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics.

PKP Conference 2009: July 8-10, Vancouver

Mark your calendar!

The 2009 Public Knowledge Project (PKP) conference dates and venue have been announced: July 8-10, 2009, in Vancouver. The event will begin with a keynote by PKP principal John Willinsky. Papers from the First International PKP Conference were published in the October 2007 First Monday.

Knowledge Exchange: Licensing and Open Access Exchange across borders

Knowledge Exchange combines national initiatives across four countries: Denmark, Germany, the UK and the Netherlands - to support multi-national licensing and support for open access initiatives.

Excerpt from About Knowledge Exchange:
Vision and goals
The agreed vision for Knowledge Exchange is:

To make a layer of scholarly and scientific content openly available on the Internet.

The goals that have been set to achieve that vision include:
* Building an integrated repository infrastructure
* Exploring new developments in the future of publishing
* Facilitating integrated management services within education and research institutions
* Supporting the European digital libraries agenda.

Looks an initiative to watch!

Two More OA Mandates

Two more OA mandates have been announced this week, by the European Commission for 20% of its research budget, and Ireland's Higher Education Authority.

Please follow the links above to Peter Suber's posts for details, comments and related links.

RSS Feed Aggregator About Open Access

Vedran Vucic has created an RSS Feed Aggregator for blogs, websites etc. on open access.

Thanks, Vedran!

ARL Releases Publisher-Author Agreements and the NIH Public Access Policy

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has just announced release of a new study on publisher/author agreements and the NIH Public Access Policy, by Ben Grillot.

IFLA award for OA Librarian pioneer

IFLA has recognized librarian and open access pioneer Rima Kupryte. Rima was among the original signatories to the Budapest Open Access Initiative

Excerpt from the IFLA Press Release:

Rima Kupryte, Director of Electronic Information for Libraries (eIFL.net) was honoured by the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) at the 74th World Library and Information Congress in Quebec, Canada. The IFLA Medal is one of the highest professional accolades and is awarded to an individual for their distinguished contribution to international librarianship.

Rima Kupryte received the award in recognition of her groundbreaking work with the Open Society Institute (OSI) and eIFL.net in sharing information at a global level. “IFLA applauds the outstanding commitment of Rima in promoting international cooperation throughout her professional career”, said Claudia Lux, IFLA President. “We are delighted to bestow this honour for her dedication in expanding access to knowledge internationally through libraries”.

Thanks to Peter Suber on Open Access News.

Gratis and libre open access

Peter Suber, in the August 2008 SPARC Open Access Newsletter just released, has found an elegant solution to the emerging need for definitions to clarify the two basic concepts of open access, free as in free to read and free as in free for use. The distinction between gratis and libre mirrors a similar distinction in open source software. While the terms may be unfamiliar, this could be an advantage, as there would not be conflicts with preexisting uses of words.

This is an important, and useful, distinction. There is much discussion about gratis open access, as this is often the focus of open access policies.

Libre access, or freedom for use, is a very important concept. It is a reflection of the maturity of the open access movement that this distinction needed to be made, from my perspective. Now that we have 50 open access mandates with more coming, and a scholarly communications system well on the way to transition, it is time to be talking about libre access.

The Libre concept, to me, is very similar to what we librarians have been talking about for years even with subscription resources. Even when we pay, we may or may not be able to make certain uses of material, from printing and downloading to interlibrary loans. Creative commons licensed material is beginning to show up in our subscription resources; so far, this is likely only occasional, but this is the tip of the iceberg.

Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) Advises Copyright Retention

The Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) has issued an Intellectual Property Advisory, advising scholars to retain their copyright, and providing advice as to how, including use of the SPARC Canadian Authors Addendum!

Excerpt (Conclusion)

Journals require only your permission to publish an article, not a wholesale transfer
of the full copyright interest. To promote scholarly communication, autonomy, integrity
and academic freedom, and education and research activities more generally, it is
important for academic staff to retain copyright in their journal articles.

Thanks to Paul Jones, CAUT and Kenneth D. Gariepy, University of Alberta.