Re: Unauthorized downloading of scientific information

[Heather Morrison <heatherm@eln.bc.ca>]

Is the concept of piracy in respect to scientific information rapidly
becoming a thing of the past?  Publishers are working toward free or open
access, along with all the other major players in scholarly communications
- authors, universities, libraries, funders.  There likely are some
publishers who do not yet have free back issues and/or allow author
self-archiving, participate in special programs for developing countries,
and so forth, if not full open access, however, this is a small and
shrinking minority.

Instead of watching over users' shoulders for "suspicious downloading"  -
potentially a violation of privacy, and one which might just as easily
pick up the curious innocent along with the pirate - why not actively
promote the very great many open access resources that are freely
available?

For starters:

The over 1,600 journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals 
at http://www.doaj.org/
OAIster, with over 5 million items in close to 500 repostories - many 
open access - is another good resource to point to:  
http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister/
A list of open access journal collections, and instructions on how to 
download MARC records for the collections, can be found at:  
http://www.eln.bc.ca/view.php?id=1124

Or download Jan Szczepanski's list of over 3,700 current OA and 608 
historic OA journals (thanks to Peter Suber's OA News) at:
Current OA journals
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/js-current.doc
(A large Word file, 3.48 MB.)

Historic or retrodigitized OA journals
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/js-retro.xls
(An Excel spreadsheet, 315 KB.)

cheers,

Heather Morrison


On 29-Jun-05, at 2:50 PM, Lloyd Davidson wrote:

> Dr. John Gorman, a professor at the CUNY John Jay College of Criminal
> Justice and the author of a recent paper in the Yale Journal of Law &
> Technology titled "Balancing National Security and Open Science: A
> Proposal for Due Process Vetting" (text available on request)  has asked
> me to post the following question for him.  Please contact Brian Gorman
> directly regarding this.  He is researching open access, open science,
> government secrecy and national security:
>
> ----------------------------------------------
>
> Q:  Have any of your libraries discovered cases of suspicious 
> downloading
> patterns from scientific journals or other technical resources by 
> walk-in
> or other users (e.g. massive downloading to capture a journal's 
> archive)?
>
> Brian Gorman, Asst. Prof.
> Law, Police Science, Criminal Justice Administration
> John Jay College of Criminal Justice
> 899 10th Ave.
> Rm 422 T
> New York, NY 10019
> 212/237-8412 (B)
> 212/237-8383 FAX
> <mailto:bgorman@jjay.cuny.edu>
>
> Lloyd A. Davidson
> Life Sciences Librarian and Head, Circulation Services
> Seeley G. Mudd Library for Science and Engineering
> Northwestern University
> Evanston, IL  60208