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Open Access and the Public Domain in Digital Data and Information for Science Proceedings of an International Symposium (2004) / Chapter Skim
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27 Overview of Open-Access and Public-Commons Initiatives in the United States
Pages 114-118

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From page 114...
... An open-access or "public-commons" approach to resource development can be defined as an end product that is free for anyone to access, utilize, copy, and make derivative products although some limited restrictions may be imposed in order to enhance retention or distribution of the resource's public availability. Open-source code and open-access models are sometimes viewed as alternative economic models or a new mode of production in which individual contributors are organized neither in response to price signals nor by firm managers.1 Under certain conditions this new form of production makes sense and works, while under other conditions it does not.
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From page 115...
... JOURNAL AND ARTICLE OPEN-ACCESS INITIATIVES There now are several major specialty collections of full-text, open-access scientific journal articles freely available on the Web. For example, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Astrophysics Data System has 300,000 full-text articles online3 and Highwire Press has about the same number focused in the biomedicine and life science fields.4 Other initiatives include the high-energy physics arXiv5 and PubMed Central.6 Most of these online archives deal with intellectual property issues on a journal-by-journal negotiation basis or have scientists submit original work directly to their archive.
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From page 116...
... Many researchers in the humanities and social sciences will be unable to contribute to pay the author charges that would allow them to contribute to the open-access scientific literature stream. Another successful model works through professional member organizations.
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From page 117...
... So far publishers are not suing scientific authors for posting their own articles on their own Web sites, so these types of systems are actually working. GENERAL PUBLIC-COMMONS APPROACHES For those uncomfortable with walking a legal tight rope, the Creative Commons project offers some hope.13 This is a thoughtful project, and once some further technical problems are solved, the approach could be embedded on the front end of every open-access data archiving and literature archiving project.
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From page 118...
... With this capability, a user will have at least some confidence that what they have found through this process, whether a music file or journal article, can be used freely without breaching someone's copyright. A third drawback may arise if the Creative Commons Project proves to be a great success and hundreds of scientists start attaching open-access licenses to their articles and data sets before submitting them for peer review.
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