Stevan Harnad's group and our's have reported several manual measurements in order to evaluate the accuracy of Chawki Hajjem's robot program, which has been extensively used by Harnad's group. Our group has now prepared an overall metaanalysis of the manual results.

Special Issue: Open Access 2004, doi:10l1016/j.serrev.2004.09.009 / Each proposal for Open Access (OA) has its unique combination of features; each argument for or against OA focuses on particular features or criteria. This article is intended to discuss these criteria, both individually and also as each of them contributes to the different proposals for OA. Evaluation of the proposals themselves is not attempted. This discussion is intended to be of value to the supporters of OA, in choosing which plan to adopt, and to those opposed to OA, in showing where the weaknesses do and do not lie. In other words, this article intends to improve the level of factual understanding in the ongoing discussions.

M.Bibl. / Please refer to full text to view abstract

Open access publishing is an initiative that aims to provide universal, unrestricted free access to full-text scholarly materials via the Internet. This presents a radically different approach to the dissemination of research articles that has traditionally been controlled by the publishing enterprise that regulates access by means of subscriptions and licences fees levied on users, predominantly academic libraries. In presenting the case for open access publishing, the thesis explored the contemporary research environment, changing modes of knowledge production, the problems associated with the existing academic journal system, and the subsequent growth of the open access movement as an intervention to reclaim scientific communication. It highlighted the ways in which open access better answers the requirements of researchers, funders, governments, and society more broadly.

Open access publishing is an initiative that aims to provide universal, unrestricted free access to full-text scholarly materials via the Internet. This presents a radically different approach to the dissemination of research articles that has traditionally been controlled by the publishing enterprise that regulates access by means of subscriptions and licences fees levied on users, predominantly academic libraries. In presenting the case for open access publishing, the thesis explored the contemporary research environment, changing modes of knowledge production, the problems associated with the existing academic journal system, and the subsequent growth of the open access movement as an intervention to reclaim scientific communication. It highlighted the ways in which open access better answers the requirements of researchers, funders, governments, and society more broadly.

Magister Bibliothecologiae - MBibl / Open access publishing is an initiative that aims to provide universal, unrestricted free access to full-text scholarly materials via the Internet. This presents a radically different approach to the dissemination of research articles that has traditionally been controlled by the publishing enterprise that regulates access by means of subscriptions and licences fees levied on users, predominantly academic libraries. In presenting the case for open access publishing, the thesis explored the contemporary research environment, changing modes of knowledge production, the problems associated with the existing academic journal system, and the subsequent growth of the open access movement as an intervention to reclaim scientific communication. It highlighted the ways in which open access better answers the requirements of researchers, funders, governments, and society more broadly. / South Africa

In recent years, a number of innovations have emerged that seek to provide sustainable alternatives to the predominant publishing paradigm. In this presentation, a variety of initiatives that exploit the inherent potential of the Web and other digital environments to offer open and enhanced access to the personal and collective scholarship of individuals, organizations, and nations are profiled. In its concluding section, the presentation focuses on the two major discipline-based repositories for library and information science scholarship,_ DLIST Archive: Digital Library of Information Science and Technology_ (http://dlist.sir.arizona.edu/) and _E-LIS_ (http://eprints.rclis.org/ ), "an electronic open access archive for scientific or technical documents, published or unpublished, in Librarianship, Information Science and Technology, and related application activities." To expedite the adoption and further development of scholar-based innovations in publishing, librarians and other information specialists are encouraged to 'Lead By Example' by depositing their own scholarship within either or both these repositories.

The disciplinary culture theory presumes that if a scholar has been familiar with self-archiving through an existing subject-based repository, this scholar will be more enthusiastic about contributing his/her research to an institutional repository than one who has not had the experience. To test the theory, this article examines self-archiving practices of a group of physicists in both a subject repository and an institutional repository. It does not find a correlation between a disciplinary culture and self-archiving practices.

This conference paper has been published by IFLA Journal, vol. 31, n 3, 2005, p. 229-233 / The development of virtual libraries that offer Internet users access to full-text documents requires the team work of librarians, editors and webmasters. In this presentation, Dr. Dominique Babini, coordinator of the Latin American and the Caribbean Social Sciences Virtual Library of the Latin American Council of Social Sciences´ Network (CLACSO), proposes the option of cooperative virtual libraries and describes how they organized a distance training course via Internet for a group of librarians and editors of 18 countries of Latin American and the Caribbean, pointing out the factors that must be considered for the organization of courses via Internet

This investigation forms part of the author's doctoral research project and was intended as a preliminary and exploratory gauging of the area in order to establish the potential for further investigation of OA (publishing) as a peripheral practice. / The regional distribution of Open Access (OA) journals in the ISI citation databases differs significantly from the overall distribution of journals, namely in favour of peripheral areas and regions constituted predominantly of poorer countries. According to McVeigh (2004) in the ISI citation databases as a whole, North America and Western Europe account for 90% of the titles indexed, yet they account for only 40% of OA journals. Less than 2% of European and North American journals employ the OA model, yet 15% of those from the Asia-Pacific region and 40% from Central and South America are OA. This leads the author to conclude that "[for] many journals, providing free content online expands their access to an international readership" (McVeigh 2004, p.4). Departing from this assumption the study at hand addresses the following questions: Is the geographic distribution of OA journals in general more favourable towards peripheral publishing countries? How does it differ from the distribution of scholarly journals in general? Which proportions of scholarly journals and of scholarly online journals are OA in different regions and in groups of economically similar countries?* For this purpose, publishing data for active scholarly/academic journals from Ulrich's Periodicals Directory and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) were gathered and analysed using descriptive statistical techniques. The data was gathered in May 2005. The results indicate interesting differences between the geographic distribution of scholarly journals in general and the subgroup of OA journals. To illustrate, among the top 25 publishing countries for all journals, 7 do not belong to the group of high income countries*, and only 6 in the case of scholarly online journals. Yet for OA journals this number increases to 11, with Brazil taking the 3rd and India the 5th spot. According to the DOAJ almost a fifth (18%) of OA journals in the Health Sciences and over a quarter (26%) of Biology and Life Science OA journals are published in the Latin American and Caribbean region. While the group of high income countries publishes 6% of its online journals as OA, 32% of those from upper middle income countries, 10% of those from lower middle income countries, and 34% of online journals emanating from low income countries are OA. Correspondingly, 5% of online journals published in Western Europe* and 6% of those from Canada and the USA are OA, yet 51% of online journals published in Latin America and the Caribbean are. (South Asia: 7%, Africa/Middle East: 8%, Eastern Europe/Central Asia: 15% East Asia/Pacific: 15%) This also has to be seen in the light of the fact that the USA, Canada, and the countries of Western Europe together account for 80% of all registered academic online journals, while their share of OA journals amounts to 59%. Due to the fast changing nature of the subject the results are meant to provide a snapshot as well as to be indicative and exploratory, and also to invite different interpretations. Yet at the same time they are also intended to instigate debate about the role OA is attributed and its significance as a peripheral practice. Notes: * see World Bank Classification of Economies. http://www.worldbank.org/data/countryclass/countryclass.html ** for the purpose of this study â Western Europeâ means pre-enlargement European Union, plus Switzerland, Iceland, and Norway.