Scholarly Communication : Open Access : Open access good for scholars. Henk Ellermann, in a post to his weblog -=(In Between)=-: Open Access and Impact, January 21, 2004, relates how he is often questioned about the usefulness of open access for scholars and discusses its potential for increased impact. He cites a tool on the Citebase site, Correlation Generator, which shows the relationship between the number of downloads (from an open access archive) for a paper and the number of times it is cited. Such a correlation for Ellerman demonstrates good sense and that "Open Access is more than just a principe [sic], it is a working principle." [Open Access News]  6:57:08 PM   [Feedback ]  

Open Access : Open source in the life sciences. An unsigned column, "Industry and government must adopt open-source methods in the life sciences," Acumen v.1, no.3 (Sept. 2003), discusses how intellectual property protections may hamper research and points to an "emerging life sciences" open source movement, citing such examples as "the Human Genome Project, the Open Bioinformatics Foundation and the Public Library of Science." The column references an article in the same issue, Common Property, which reportedly covers these topics more in depth, but only the introductory paragraphs are available online. [Open Access News]  4:21:27 PM   [Feedback ]