ACS Offers Open-Access Option To Authors
Chemical & Engineering News 84(36):11 (September 4, 2006)
In October, American Chemical Society journal authors will have the option of paying to immediately provide free online access to their articles on the society's website. Authors will also be able to post electronic copies of their sponsored articles on personal websites and institutional repositories. Fees for the program will range from $1,000 to $3,000 per paper, depending on whether the author is an ACS member or is affiliated with an institution that subscribes to ACS journals.
The new ACS AuthorChoice option "underscores the society's willingness to experiment with innovative models to broaden access to highly valued, peer-reviewed research" while upholding editorial standards, says Brian D. Crawford, senior vice president responsible for the journal publishing program of ACS, which also publishes C&EN. "The fee was established in light of the society's actual costs incurred in the peer review and publication of an article."
Other publishers, including Elsevier and Oxford Journals, are experimenting with author-supported open access (C&EN, July 3, page 8). Oxford last week released the results of the first year of its trial. Senior Editor Claire Bird noted that "the highest uptake has been in areas where more funding for open access is available, such as the life sciences." Some 10% of life sciences authors paid for open access. Overall, authors have sponsored almost 400 papers for open access in the 49 journals that are part of the trial.
It is welcome news for authors that ACS's prior policy of prohibiting authors from any sort of self-archiving (both pre- and post-prints) seems to have been lifted, provided the open access fee is paid. Of course, that big $1000-3000 fee will be its own problem.
My big question concerns publishing articles in ACS journals where the research was conducted using government funding. Since law now mandates these be open access, can ACS prohibit publication if the fee cannot be paid by the author?
September 07, 2006
A privacy paradox: Social networking in the United States
by Susan B. Barnes
First Monday 11(9) (September 2006)
Teenagers will freely give up personal information to join social networks on the Internet. Afterwards, they are surprised when their parents read their journals. Communities are outraged by the personal information posted by young people online and colleges keep track of student activities on and off campus. The posting of personal information by teens and students has consequences. This article will discuss the uproar over privacy issues in social networks by describing a privacy paradox; private versus public space; and, social networking privacy issues. It will finally discuss proposed privacy solutions and steps that can be taken to help resolve the privacy paradox.
Here's an excerpt.
Commercial social networking sites thrive "on a sense of immediacy and community. The spirit is independent, even rebellious." Teenagers are learning how to use social networks by interacting with their friends, rather than learning these behaviors from their parents or teachers. "[Public conventions] generate our manners and morals -- our shared assumptions -- and allow communications." Often parents have no clue about the information teens are publicly revealing (Sullivan, 2005). Currently, a new type of communication behavior is emerging amongst teenagers as they explore their identities, experiment with behavioral norms, date, and build friendships.
Social networking sites, including Friendster.com, Tagged.com, Xanga.com, LiveJournal, MySpace, Facebook, and LikedIn have developed on the Internet over the past several years. For instance, MySpace was launched in January, 2004 and last November the Nielsen/Net Ratings, estimated that there were 24.5 million unique visitors to the site. More recently, the site boosted 90 million members or nearly one-third of the U.S. population (Noguchi, 2006). DeWolfe and Anderson, employees of Intermix Media, Inc. wanted to create MySpace as an Internet portal to rival Yahoo, MSN, and Google. In contrast to information seeking or news, their site would be based on user-generated content. The original content offered was music and band promotions, and the site quickly attracted many celebrities and fans. In March 2006, MySpace was the second most trafficked site on the Internet with Facebook at number 7. At times, MySpace has had more traffic than Google (Duffy, 2006).
Last September, Rupert Murdoch purchased MySpace from Intermix for a reported $580 million cash buyout. Currently, "Murdoch is getting: a gold mine of market research, a microscope into the content habits and brand choices of America's capricious youth market -- not to mention millions of potential new customers for News Corp.'s Fox subsidiaries.". Similarly, Christine Rosen, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, observed that some of the discussion groups on Facebook look like mailing lists. The same names of discussion groups are also the names used in marketing directories. The commercial aspect of the site is quite apparent.
September 12, 2006
Particle Physicists Want to Expand Open Access
Jocelyn Kaiser
Science 313(5791): 1215. (requires subscription)
Particle physicists have come up with a novel way to promote free, immediate access to journal articles. Led by CERN, the giant lab near Geneva, Switzerland, they want to raise at least $6 million a year to begin buying open access to all published papers in their field.
The proposal adds fuel to the ongoing debate about public access to research results. Some private biomedical funding groups, such as the U.K.'s Wellcome Trust, now pay the author fees required for their grantees to publish in open-access journals. CERN's announcement goes further, say observers. "Across a discipline is new," says Peter Suber, a philosophy professor at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, who closely follows open-access developments for the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition.
CERN organizers cite next year's start-up of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the most powerful accelerator ever, as the proposal's motivation. That will be "a unique opportunity to reform the publishing paradigm of the particle physics community to ensure the widest, most efficient dissemination of results from this unique facility," a task force of CERN, other particle physics funders, and scientific publishers concluded in a report issued in June.
To accomplish this goal, the task force proposed that a consortium of labs and funding agencies pay publication costs for particle physics papers. It would cost $6 million or more a year to include all the journals willing to offer an open-access option, the group estimated. That would cover up to half of the 6000 or so original theory and experimental papers published each year.
September 12, 2006
Banned book week
Tomorrow is the start of banned book week. ALA has a nice set of materials for librarians, authors, and readers. Even scientists read banned books.
I've got my web badge; have you? 
Edit See also Google's banned book page as a nice complement to the ALA site. They have links to books in their Google Books collection, some of which are available full-text.
September 22, 2006
