1. Bundesanstalt für Materialforschung und —prüfung (BAM, or Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing)
2. Bundesanstalt für Geowissenschaften und Rohstoffe (BGR, or Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources)
3. Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB, or National Metrology Institute of Germany)

source: Three more German institutions sign the Berlin Declaration

The relationship of copyright law to the creation and publication of scholarly works is a critical concern for the advancement of new knowledge. The owner of the copyrights in scholarly publications can often control access to the information in those publications, as well as control many uses of [them]….Readers and other researchers are often constrained in their ability to access and use those new works by the limitations and controls that can result from copyright protection. How faculty authors, working with their universities and publishers, make decisions about the management of the copyright can have profound consequences for the ability of researchers, students, libraries, and other users to obtain, read, disseminate, and learn from scholarly works and the information they embody….

In the 1990s many of the stakeholders in these developments began to witness immediate and complicated implications for research related to copyright law. These developments prompted SURF Foundation…to initiate an international copyright project. SURF Foundation was seeking a cooperative approach to these often contentious issues. The initiative became known as the “Zwolle Group,” and it has now completed five years of developing and sharing guidance for faculty authors, publishers, librarians, and other stakeholders who are seeking to improve their management of copyright issues. The cooperation of major stakeholders as equal partners makes the Zwolle initiative unique in the world.

This article marks…provides an examination of the issues and the projects of the Zwolle Group….

A most recent product pursuing implementation of the Zwolle Principles is a paper examining Open Access [Frederick Friend, December 2004]. The paper concludes that good rights management procedures are as important for open access content as they are for purchased content. The paper examines the issues and interests at stake in the management of copyrights, with a view toward facilitating open access, particularly the availability of scholarly works through institutional repositories. The purpose of the procedures is not to hinder the legitimate use of the open access content but to protect the legitimate interests of stakeholders. Licences and clear copyright and other rights statements are the key tools in the implementation of the Zwolle Principles in relation to open access content….

source: Overview of the Zwolle principles

source: On the road

Introductory bibliography to Open Access in the biomedical field, as made out for the congress Institutional archives for research: experiences and projects in Open Access, Rome 29 nov-1 dec 2006. It lists “Web resources” with a practical target and more theoretical “Contributions”. Online version [here].

source: Bibliography of OA in biomedicine

The ROARMAP Registry of University and Funder Self-Archiving Mandates keeps growing: 56 policies, 20 adopted mandates, and 5 proposed mandates so far, worldwide. But the latest mandate proposal from EURAB is the best of them all: So good that I don’t have a single recommendation for improving it! It has all the essential ingredients:

1. Deposit of peer-reviewed postprint is required
2. Deposit required immediately upon acceptance for publication (no exceptions, no delays)
3. Deposit in Institutional or Central Repository
4. Set access to deposit as Open Access as soon as possible, within 6 months at the latest.

Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates:  What? Where? When? Why? How?

That’s it. It’s not possible to design a better policy, or one that is surer to get the entire international research community to 100% OA more reliably, quickly or effectively….Please emulate it at your university, research institution or funding agency and we’ll reach the optimal and inevitable at long last….

source: More on the OA mandate proposal from EURAB

Arthur Sale, The Patchwork Mandate, D-Lib Magazine, January/February 2007. 

This article is written mainly for repository managers who are at a loss as to what policies they (or their universities or research institutions) ought to deploy in order to ensure that most, if not all, of the institution’s scholarly output is deposited in the institution’s repository. In essence, there are only two pure policies:  [1] requiring (mandating) researchers to deposit, and [2] relying on voluntary (spontaneous) participation, with or without encouragement.  This short article describes a third policy that provides a transitional path between the two….

I call it the patchwork mandate for reasons that will become obvious….What is the patchwork mandate? Simply this:

1. Knowing that you have been unable to convince the senior executives, you nevertheless personally commit to having a mandate across your institution.
2. You aim to pursue a strategy that will achieve an institutional mandate in the long term. (It is highly recommended that you register your intention to do this in ROARMAP so as to encourage other repository managers caught in the same dilemma.)
3. Since you haven’t been able to get an institutional mandate, you work instead towards getting departmental (school/faculty) mandates one by one. Each departmental mandate will rapidly trend towards 100%, and little activism is needed to maintain this level….

PS:  This is the published version of paper I blogged as a preprint on November 11, 2006.  See my earlier post for a supportive comment.

source: Mandating OA department by department

source: more sometime but

Comet McNaught hasn’t disappointed. As it veered into Mercury’s orbit, the comet ejected fiery debris, putting on a spectacular show visible in the daytime, with the naked eye. Astronomers assign a numerical value to celestial objects to denote their brightness; the lower the number, the brighter the object. Comet McNaught has reached minus 5, compared to minus 4 for the planet Venus
[ The Brilliant Comet McNaught - Astronomy ]

Unfortunately for those of us in the northern hemisphere, McNaught’s round of the Sun shoots it out to our southern side, which is just as well considering the cloudy cold-snap up here in the woodlands. If you’d like to sneak a peek before it skips out to Argentina, Space.com has viewing maps and links to the archival and current SOHO images

source: The Brilliant Comet McNaught

Last Monday I came down with a lower-GI-only-version that took me out for all of Tuesday. Two GI bugs in two weeks—I figured I was particularly unlucky.

This morning I woke up at 3:30am with what turned out to be round two of the norovirus (or something very like it). It was worse, not better, the second time around. I wasn’t able to keep liquids down until late afternoon, and while the symptoms have abated now I still feel like I’ve been hit by a bus.

A little research on the CDC site (once I was able to sit up again) yielded two relevant pieces of information. First, that it is possible to be reinfected, though typically people get a few months of resistance rather than a few weeks. And second, that people with type O blood (that’s me) are genetically predisposed to be more vulnerable to the virus.

I really hope that this bad luck traveled in threes, and that I won’t be seeing symptoms like these again in the near future.

source: sick sick sick of being sick

The 2007 Database Issue of Nucleic Acids Research is the fourteenth in a series dedicated to databases in the field of molecular biology. These databases are essential resources for experimental and computational biologists alike and this compilation provides descriptions and updates of the most important of these databases, and serves to introduce newly compiled resources that provide specialist information in the biological area. The current issue is the largest yet and presents 68 new databases and updates of 106 existing databases. The 2007 Database Issue is not included in the print subscription to NAR. Instead, the Database Issue is freely available online to all under NAR’s open access model. However, print copies are available for separate purchase by institutions and individuals….

Having now edited the database issue for 4 years and carefully inspected over a thousand different biological databases. I feel I am well placed to give advice to prospective authors. There are many important aspects to any web accessible database that might be published in [a future edition of] this issue….

• Do attribute the original sources of derived data.
• Do make sure that you are not breaching any license terms by redistributing data….
• Do make data available for bulk download as flat files or relational database tables with associated documentation.
• Web services and DAS are becoming popular ways to make databases programmatically available. Making these available can stop your website being ground to a halt by users trying to screen scrape all your data.
• Do allow users to provide feedback on your data and submit new data….

source: Advice for OA database maintainers