Zzzoot

The article When Is Open Access Not Open Access? (CJ MacCallum) PLoS Biology examines the slippery activities of publishers that try and fly the flag of Open Access (with varying degrees of capitalization) but who only offer the free-as-in-beer definition of freedom, as opposed to the Open Access definition, which includes --- as well as free- gratis freedom -- extensive intellectual property rights permitting unrestricted derivative use. This issue and these distinctions were discussed earlier this year in " Free but not open? " at the PLoS blog. I have noticed that many journals use the weasel words like " We conform to open access as defined by SHERPA ". The SHERPA definition does not include the extensive IP rights described by Open Access: By "open access" to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of...

Nature has announced what is basically a repository, Nature Preceedings - similar to arXiv.org for physics - for researchers in biology, medicine, chemistry and the Earth sciences to share early findings: " pre-publication research, unpublished manuscripts, presentations, posters, white papers, technical papers, supplementary findings, and other scientific documents ". There is no peer review, but staff curators filter-out materials that are not legitimate scientific contributions. There are also 13 subject RSS feeds. Of particular interest is how every item is given a DOI or Handler, making it more easily citable. More discussion at O'Reilly Radar and Connotea.