Monday, December 02, 2002

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BioMedNet Outrage at search engine closure
[requires 'free' registration]

"The closure of the search engine PubScience earlier this month has caused outrage among US librarians who fear that other publicly funded search engines may suffer the same fate - even the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central. If so, it would leave access to scientific citations in the hands of private industry, which could prove prohibitively expensive to some users, say opponents."

""What's next on the chopping block - are they going to attack PubMed?" asked Emily Sheketoff, executive director of the American Library Association, who has lobbied hard against the closure. SIIA is on record as saying that it would not target PubMed, but this held little comfort for Sheketoff. "Well, certainly not this year!" she retorted."

redux [11.16.02]
Federal Computer Week More sites targeted for shutdown

"Having persuaded the Energy Department to pull the plug on PubScience, a Web site that offered free access to scientific and technical articles, commercial publishers are taking aim at government-funded information services offering free legal and agricultural data.

"We're delighted with the decision [to shut down PubScience]," LeDuc said. "The administration has done a tremendous job of hearing our concerns and responding to what we've always considered to be our legitimate concern."

redux [09.24.02]
BioMedNet Adam Smith and science journals
[requires 'free' registration]

"The UK's Office of Fair Trading says that the prices for scientific, technical, and medical (STM) journals are too high because normal competitive forces have been suspended. Libraries are paying too much. The prices of STMs are rising faster than inflation, and the disparity between for-profit and not-for-profit journals is obvious. Part of the problem is that the journals compete on quality, not price, so libraries are prone to skip the cheaper journals for the better, more expensive ones. Bundling journals also skews the market.

Goodman, S. 2002. "Unusual forces" are pushing journal market off course. Nature 419(6904):239.

redux [09.05.01]
BioMedNet Profit vs. Public access
[requires 'free' registration]

"Publishers of established scientific journals have thus far resisted demands for freer access. In its campaign to make biomedical research literature available free online, Public Library of Science is now taking a new tack: It hopes to publish peer-reviewed, electronic journals.

"If we really want to change the publication of scientific research, we must do the publishing ourselves," says an announcement posted Sept. 1 on the group's Web site. "It is time for us to work together to create the journals we have called for."

redux [04.24.01]
Scientific American Publish Free or Perish

"When a molecular biologist or a biochemist has made a discovery - often after many months or even years of tedious experiments - they tell the rest of the world by publishing their results in a scientific journal. So far, these journals have controlled who can read them and who cannot - but maybe not for much longer.

E-mail, Internet discussion groups, electronic databases and pre- or e-print servers have already transformed the way scientists openly exchange their results. And in the life sciences, researchers are now demanding that their work be included in at least one free central electronic archive of published literature, challenging the traditional ownership of publishers. The demand has sparked widespread discussions among scientists, publishers, scientific societies and librarians about the future of scientific publishing. The outcome may be nothing short of a revolution in the scientific publishing world."

redux [09.20.00]
BioMedCentral Freedom of Information Conference: The impact of open access on biomedical research

"How should biomedical research be communicated? How should research be assessed and validated?"

"Below are abstracts, transcripts, and biographies from the conference. Some presentations did not lend themselves to transcription. Where possible we have supplemented them with editorials from the speakers.

We have also commissioned editorial articles from several speakers and delagates at the meeting."