Open Access : History of an important OA repository. Carol Ann Hughes, EScholarship at the University of California: a case study in sustainable innovation for open access, New Library World, 105, 3 (2004) pp. 118-124. Only this abstract is free online for non-subscribers, at least so far: "This paper describes the history of the University of California eScholarship program, a joint effort of the University of California Libraries in collaboration with the California Digital Library. It discusses the context that gave rise to the creation of the eScholarship Repository, the logistical issues involved in setting up a multi-campus persistent repository for scholarly output, and future issues to be addressed in developing experimental reconfigurations of the components of scholarly communication in collaboration with communities of scholars." [Open Access News]  11:20:44 AM   [Feedback ]  

Open Access : OA database of Russian literature and folklore. Alexander Osipovich, Virtual Archive, Moscow Times, April 16-24, 2004. An overview of the open-access Fundamental Digital Library of Russian Literature and Folklore (known by its Russian acronym, FEB). Quoting David Powelstock, professor of Russian literature at Brandeis University: FEB is "the most remarkable web resource for the study of Russian literature I have ever seen. I've been working with the [FEB section on the poet] Lermontov..., and it is hard to exaggerate how wonderful a tool this is....It's really phenomenal." Quoting Igor Pilshchikov, FEB's editor-in-chief: "In philology, as in other fields of the humanities, a great deal of effort is spent on routine tasks like searching. Traditionally, philologists spend about 80 percent of their time searching for material, and 20 percent actually analyzing it. With our site, this ratio can be reversed." (Thanks to Shelflife.) [Open Access News]  7:58:00 AM   [Feedback ]  

Open Access : More on the ISI report on the impact of OA journals. Mike Shanahan, Open-access journals are impacting science community, SciDev.Net, April 16, 2004. A short note on the new ISI study. Excerpt: "Thomson ISI, the company whose Web of Science tool dominates academic literature searches online, has announced that open-access journals are having an increasing impact in the world of scientific research." [Open Access News]  7:55:46 AM   [Feedback ]  

Open Access : Open letter on the scholarly communication crisis. On October 24, 2003, Gabrielle von Roten, President of the Conference of German-Swiss University Libraries (Konferenz Deutschschweizer Hochschulbibliotheken), sent an open letter (in German) to the Conference of Rectors of the same universities, describing the scholarly communication crisis and calling on the rectors to adopt remedial measures. Among other measures, the libraries wanted a network of OA document servers, the evaluation of research faculty in part through traffic and usage data from these servers, and the gradual elimination of exorbitantly priced publications. (Thanks to Klaus Graf.) [Open Access News]  7:50:18 AM   [Feedback ]