The Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006 bill would require that federally funded research appearing in peer-reviewed journals be made openly accessible in digital repositories within six months of publication. See: beSpacific and Red Tape Blog. For additional discussion, be sure to include Open Access News and American Scientist Open Access Forum For some excellent background information on Open Access, good starting points include:

• Electronic Journals and Open Access via the National Network of Libraries of Medicine
• Medical Library Association: Statement on Open Access
• Open Access: Where You Publish Makes A Difference via Stanford University Lane Medical Library & Knowledge Management Center
• WMC Library - Open Access via Weill Cornell Medical Library

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Please pop on over to the left column of the site and participate in our new FGI poll: "How do you archive (personally or institutionally) digital govt documents?". We'd love to know your thoughts too so feel free to leave a comment. Continue reading →

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When I interviewed for my current position as Head, Serials Services at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center’s Robert M. Bird Health Sciences Library, there was a proposal for the potential privatization of the journal Environmental Health Perspectives. Due to efforts of the American Library Association (ALA) and the Medical Library Association (MLA) and many other interested organizations and individuals, it appears that Environmental Health Perspectives [EHP] is now an open access journal and the website proudly notes that “all content is freely available to everyone online immediately after publication”. Open Access, like Information Literacy, has a number of definitions and interpretations, and my hope in this guest blog is to provide some avenues of information on the topic. Those of us who remember “early threats” to access to government funded research may recall that one of the first, if not the first, journal of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to be privatized. In 1997, the Government Printing Office’s Library Program Service was notified that the Journal of the National Cancer Institute had been "privatized." Ownership was transferred from the National Cancer Institute to Oxford University Press - USA, Inc. Superintendent of Documents Wayne Kelley said that the letter went on to explain that "because the Journal is no longer a publication of the U.S. Government, copies of the Journal and JNCI Monographs will not be provided to the Depository Library Program nor will sale copies be available at the GPO bookstore." and that "the new price, from Oxford, is $120 for an individual and $150 for an institution". Current pricing for the OUHSC library for this title is $585 for print and online. And, fortunately, Oxford Journals does include JNCI and other titles in it’s “ Open Access experiments”. Continue reading →

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Another interesting and informative article on the issue of network neutrality says that "Colleges worry that research and distance education could be left behind if broadband companies are allowed to favor certain content." The same can be said for citizen access to government information.

• The Fight for a Toll-Free Internet, By Andrea L. Foster, The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 5, 2006.

The online version requires a subscription, but the ACM has this useful summary:

The hot-button "network neutrality" issue is of critical concern to academic institutions, who fear that broadband providers' preferential treatment of certain types of content could hurt their efforts to deliver education and collaborate on research over the Internet. Colleges are lobbying Congress to require telecom companies to allow any kind of Web content or network applications, including those that rival their own offerings, to pass through their broadband pipes, and not to practice discrimination against certain types of network traffic. Meanwhile, telecom firms have been pushing lawmakers to reject net neutrality provisions, arguing that the profits they stand to reap by exacting a toll from users who want their online content to be prioritized and delivered expeditiously would recoup their costs for upgrading network infrastructure for consumers. There is consensus among academic leaders, consumer groups, and technology companies that splitting the Internet into faster and slower service tiers betrays the underlying principles of openness upon which the Web was founded, and could therefore threaten innovations and consumers' unrestricted access to critical information. At a Senate commerce committee hearing in February, Gary Bachula with the Internet2 consortium cited the high-speed Abilene network and the sophisticated applications it supports as an example of innovations that are being crafted by end users rather than phone or cable companies. "That requires an open-standards-based nondiscriminatory Internet," he argued. An anonymous college lobbyist reports that many college presidents are torn between two camps: Broadband carriers in whose good graces the presidents wish to remain because they often supply campuses with communications services; and distance-learning and research programs that could be seriously degraded by a tiered Internet. (ACM TechNews, May 05, 2006)

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