RE: Unauthorized downloading of scientific information

["Sloan, Bernie" <bernies@uillinois.edu>]

Heather's remark about picking up "the curious innocent along with the
pirate" reminded me of something.

While searching the Web last week, I ran across a bibliometric study where
the authors gathered data by downloading four or five years' worth of
papers from 36 journals in a specific subject area. I was just wondering
how this sort of activity might be viewed by a publisher?

(Sorry, I couldn't reconstruct the search that got me to this study, so I
can't supply specific details).

Bernie Sloan

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Sent: Thursday, June 30, 2005 9:32 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Re: Unauthorized downloading of scientific information

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