Fsf-friends May 2004

fsf-friends@gnu.org.in

23 participants
43 discussions

Open access to scholarly information
by V. Sasi Kumar 28 May '04

28 May '04

Here is an update on the Open Access Initiative -------------- From: Stevan Harnad <harnad(a)ecs.soton.ac.uk> Reply-To: BOAI Forum <boai-forum(a)ecs.soton.ac.uk> To: AmSci Forum <american-scientist-open-access-forum(a)amsci.org> Subject: [BOAI] Elsevier Gives Authors Green Light for Open Access Self-Archiving Date: Thu, 27 May 2004 23:51:58 +0100 (BST) Elsevier has just gone from being a Romeo "Pale-Green" publisher to a full Romeo Green publisher: Authors have the publisher's official green light to self-archive both their pre-refereeing preprints and their refereed postprints. Elsevier has thereby demonstrated that -- whatever its pricing policy may be -- it is a publisher that has heeded the need and the expressed desire of the research community for Open Access (OA) and its benefits to research productivity and progress. http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/accessdebate/21.html There will be the predictable cavils from the pedants and those who have never understood the real meaning and nature of OA: "It's only the final refereed draft, not the publisher's PDF," "It does not include republishing rights," "Elsevier is still not an OA publisher." I, for one, am prepared to stoutly defend Elsevier on all these counts, and to say that one could not have asked for more, and that the full benefits of OA require not one bit more -- from the publisher. For now it's down to you, Dear Researchers! Elsevier (and History) is hereafter fully within its rights to say: "If Open Access is truly as important to researchers as they claim it is -- indeed as 30,000+ signatories to the PLoS Open Letter attested that it was http://www.publiclibraryofscience.org/cgi-bin/plosSign.pl -- then if researchers are not now ready to *provide* that Open Access, even when given the publisher's official green light to do so, then there is every reason to doubt that they mean (or even know) what they are saying when they clamour for Open Access." Elsevier publishes 1,700+ journals. That means at least 200,000 articles a year. Eprints.org will be carefully quantifying and tracking what proportion of those 200,000 articles is made OA by their authors through self-archiving across the next few months and years. Indeed we will be monitoring all of the over 80% of journals sampled by Romeo that are already green. (The following Romeo summary stats are already out of date, because 1700 pale-green journals have now become bright green! http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/Romeo/romeosum.html but we will soon catch up at: http://romeo.eprints.org/ [which is under construction, waiting for full journal lists from each of the 93 publishers sampled so far].) The OA ball is now clearly in the research community's court (not the publishing community's, not the library community's). Let researchers and their employers and funders now all rise to the occasion by adopting and implementing institutional OA provision policies. Don't just sign petitions for publishers to provide OA, but commit your own institution to providing it: http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php Stevan Harnad -- V. Sasi Kumar <vsasi(a)hotpop.com>

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Open access to scholarly information
by V. Sasi Kumar 27 May '04

27 May '04

Statement on open access to scholarly information The Group of Eight vice-chancellors, representing Australia's pre-eminent research universities, record their commitment to open access initiatives that will enhance global access to scholarly information for the public good. The vice-chancellors note that: * information, if it is to achieve maximum benefit for society, must be readily available to a global audience * the rapid development of digital communication technologies provides expanded opportunities for the widespread dissemination of scholarly information * new business models are required to ensure that scholarly publishing is cost effective * any development in digital publishing must incorporate the current framework of scholarly publishing standards relating to the quality of inquiry and reporting * digital publishing initiatives must appropriately recognise and protect the intellectual property of the authors and require accepted standards of attribution * the Group of Eight universities are providing leadership in the development of digital publishing initiatives in Australia. The vice-chancellors support: * ongoing development of open access initiatives in Group of Eight universities * digital publishing practices that underpin the timely, cost-effective dissemination of the highest quality scholarly information with a commitment to good practice * further examination of criteria for promotion in new publishing models. Professor Ian W. Chubb AO Chair, The Group of Eight Vice-Chancellor The Australian National University Professor James McWha Vice-Chancellor The University of Adelaide Professor Kwong Lee Dow AM Vice-Chancellor The University of Melbourne Professor Richard Larkins AO Vice-Chancellor Monash University Professor Mark Wainwright Vice-Chancellor The University of New South Wales Professor John A. Hay AC Vice-Chancellor The University of Queensland Professor Gavin Brown Vice-Chancellor The University of Sydney Professor Alan Robson AM Vice-Chancellor The University of Western Australia April 2004 -- V. Sasi Kumar <vsasi(a)hotpop.com>

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Science Olympiads... Prof Vijay A Singh
by Frederick Noronha (FN) 25 May '04

25 May '04

During our recent GNU/LUG meeting in Goa, I had the chance of meeting Prof Vijay A Singh, the National Coordinator of the Science Olympiads. It was nice to know that Dr Singh (IIT Kanpur, on deputation at the Science Olympaids, is also a part of the FSF-Friends list. Wonder if the ideals of Free Software and FLOSS could be somehow networked with the National Olympaid, so that we could benefit from each other's synergies. Incidentally, Prof Singh is at the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education, so it could be easy for Prof Nagarjuna to build the links too. BTW, we have just shifted the venue of the GNU/LUG meetings in Goa to the Goa Science Centre, located at a nice setting on the Miramar beach. Our argument was that while the GSCP (Goa Science Centre Panjim) is promoting science, we are promoting technology -- as such a made-for-each-other match. We hope that we can take the idealism of FLOSS to the younger generation, and thus help take ahead the agenda of the GSCP, while at the same time gaining from a suitable venue for holding our meets. Let's see how this works. In the past, our Goa group had also closely networked with the Computer Society of India (Goa chapter). The only handicap was the lack of hardware for demos at their office premises, which they were very generous to loan out to us without any charge for our meetings held over the past two to three years. FN -- --------------------------------------------------------- Frederick Noronha * Freelance Journalist * Goa, India f r e d @ b y t e s f o r a l l . o r g Ph 832.2409490 / 832.2409783 Cell 9822 122436 Phone calls: preferably from 1300 to 0500 (IST) Try landlines is mobile is temporarily unavailable JUST OUT: Goa photos http://www.goa-world.com/fotofolio ---------------------------------------------------------

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Free Software User's Group in Bangalore...
by Abhas Abhinav 24 May '04

24 May '04

Dear Friends, Bangalore now has a Free Software User's Group (FSUG)! Starting off from the 'GNUs Grazing' initiative by Rakesh Ambati we have met up twice already. During Arun's trip to Bangalore earlier this month, we were able to press out a firm agenda for Free Software related activities in Bangalore. Broadly speaking, FSUG (Bangalore) works towards two broad areas: o Free Software advocacy, lobbying and awareness in Bangalore o Technical help for Free Software and GNU/Linux The minutes of previous two meetings are available in the list archives (not yet web-viewable) and will be put up on a web-site by tomorrow. (Or I could post them here to the fsf-friends list if that's more convenient!) FSUG (Bangalore) discussions happen on the fsub-bangalore mailing list. To know more about what's happenning, who's involved and how to get involved, please subscribe to the mailing list by sending an email to fsub-bangalore-subscribe(a)lists.deeproot.co.in . A lot of activities are planned for the next few weeks - please do participate and give you comments and feedback. Regards, Abhas. -- Abhas Abhinav <abhas(a)deeproot.co.in> CEO, DeepRoot Linux http://www.deeproot.co.in / +91 (80) 2856 5624 Getting Linux to work for you. Faster. Better. Today. Every way.

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Say 'NO' To SCO !
by Rakesh 'arky' Ambati 21 May '04

21 May '04

Dear Friends, Take few minutes off your nice weekend and read about the subpoena. Let's unite our voices to say no to SCO http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/sco/subpoena.html TIA --arky __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Domains � Claim yours for only $14.70/year http://smallbusiness.promotions.yahoo.com/offer

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FLOSS "Concept Booklet" WIKI!
by Aniruddha Shankar 20 May '04

20 May '04

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 The FLOSS Concept Booklet Wiki is online at http://wikibooks.org/wiki/FLOSS_Concept_Booklet For those who are not exactly clear on what a wiki is, it's a collaborative Web site comprised of the collective work of many authors. Similar to a blog in structure and logic, a wiki allows anyone to easily edit, delete or modify content that has been placed there. This method of working, apart from being a literal application of the collaborative opensource methodology will allow many many more people than would otherwise be possible to contribute. The more the people who read, comment and modify, the denser will be this resource base, so please, people, contribute! The original introduction to the FLOSS Concept Booklet that I had posted in my earlier mail is appended with the appropriate modifications: Hello. I work in a non-profit organisation (www.sarai.net) that is deeply involved in and committed to Free/Libre/Open Source Software. We're in the process of creating and publishing a Concept Booklet on Free/Libre/Open Source Software that will, hopefully, be accessible even to people with an extremely limited understanding of computers and absolutely no knowledge of open source/free/libre software. In collaboration with one such layperson, we created a set of questions on FLOSS and are in the process of generating the answers and the additional content for the concept booklet. We'd be thrilled if you people would contribute as many answers as you can to the questions that are outlined in the wiki. Of course, please feel free to comment on the existing questions and to make additions to them. All contributions will be gratefully acknowledged. The booklet will either be published under the Creative Commons/Share Alike License or the GNU Free Documentation License and distributed free or at a nominal cost. We will, of course, be providing a full version online, including print-quality PDFs. This call for contributions from the wider community interested in free/libre/open source software is an effort to extend the methodology used in creating free software into the arena of collaborative publishing. All contributions, no matter how small, trivial or they might seem, are extremely valuable to us. Please, do take the time to read the questions and contribute, if possible. I apologise to those who are subscribed to two or more of the lists to which this is posted for the crosspost. Please feel free to forward this email to people or entities that you feel might be helpful. cheers, - -- Aniruddha 'Karim' Shankar The Sarai Programme Key ID: 0xA037AD2B Public Key Fingerprint: 9167 C0E7 A679 0906 7E47 83C0 8499 2B77 A037 AD2B To get my public key, search http://pgp.mit.edu for my email id. To directly import my key into your keyring, run gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys A037AD2B . -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFArFVNhJkrd6A3rSsRAlgZAKC4yee13L3tCTb/k3n/6XP+JbcRBgCgnK4o HgX6ZHf4OczksDK0DEaX8BY= =3fIN -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Some news aand some threats
by Mahesh T. Pai 19 May '04

19 May '04

An update to the FSF site. http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/sco/subpoena.html And oh. That is a non-threat. So what are the real threats? See http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20040226003735733 -- "Those willing to give up a little liberty for a little security deserve neither security nor liberty"

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Re: [Fsf-friends] FLOSS concept booklet...
by Vijay Kumar Bagavath Singh 19 May '04

19 May '04

I have answered a few questions. But I guess the questions need a little bit of reordering and rephrasing. I am posting this to the fsf-friends list so that the experts can correct me. It would be better if this could be done on wiki. Vijay ---------- Intro / Concept: What is free software? Free software is software that gives the user the following four freedoms Freedom 0: Freedom to run the program. Freedom 1: Freedom to help yourself, by studying and modifying the program to your needs. Freedom 2: Freedom to help your neighbour, by distributing copies of the program. Freedom 3: Freedom to help build your community, by publishing a modified version of the program. Well tell me what's not "free" about other kinds of software? So "free" means that I don't have to spend any money then? With free software, it might not be possible to "sell" the software itself. But when you get free software, you might be paying for the distribution media. Or you might be paying for support bundled along with the software. Or you might be paying for printed manuals that come along with the software. So in some cases you might get the software for zero dollars, in some cases you might be paying a small amount, and in yet some cases you might be paying a lot! Whether the software is gratis or not is an unimportant side issue, what is important is whether you have the above said freedoms. Proprietary software could also be obtained gratis. For example Microsoft is giving schools gratis copies of Windows, that does not make Windows ethically legitimate. How is Free Software actually made? You mean, how do people raise funds to develop free software? Many people who write free software are volunteers, they probably have an unrelated day time job. These people spend their free time developing free software. Commercial organisations that benefit from free software distribution or that provide free software support also develop free software by investing portions of their profit. Example of such organsiations are Redhat and Mandrake. There are many non-profit organisations that raise funds to develop free software, through donations from free software users. The Free Software Foundation is one such organisation. Other examples are SPI, Gnome Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, and the like. Some free software packages are developed by universities. The Festival text to speech engine, Octave - the Matlab clone are examples of software developed by universities. Many commercial organisations also contribute to the development of free software, because these organisations benefit from the existing free software code base. For example IBM maintains the port of the Linux kernel to the PowerPC, because it needs a OS for its processor. So how is this different from the production of other kinds of software? Well, freedom three has enabled a new development methodology, in which a lot of people can collabrate through the internet and can help make the software better. This has resulted in free software being superior in quality to other non-free software. So the term Free Software is a legal definition then? What do you mean by "Copyleft" ? What's wrong with copyright? How is this different? One way to make your software free would be put the program in the public domain. That way there would be no restrictions on the program and the users of the software would have the above four freedoms. But there is a problem with this approach. It enables uncooperative people to take free software make modifications in it and release it as non-free software. The new features might tempt some of the users to give up their freedom. And the free software developers would be forced to compete with improved versions of their own software! This is not mere speculation, this has happened with the X Window system and the BSD operating system, where less restrictive free software licenses were used. Copyleft is a way of using the copyright provisions to prevent people from parasitically using free software code in non-free programs. Copyleft ensures that the freedoms are passed along in every version of a free software program. The GNU General Public License is a realisation of the copyleft. What's wrong with copyright is a very different issue. You might want to read Stallman's essay on "Misinterpreting Copyright - A series of errors". But remember most of the free software programs are copyrighted. Is this Copyleft against the law? No. What does GNU GPL stand for? The GNU General Public License. If this software is free as you say then why do we need legislation to protect it? What is this supposed to mean... What other licenses exist to protect Free Software? There are many license that make a software free. But only some of them preserve the freedom aka copyleft. The non-copyleft license include MIT, BSD, ... The copyleft licenses include the GPL, LGPL, ... -- ______________________________________________ Check out the latest SMS services @ http://www.linuxmail.org This allows you to send and receive SMS through your mailbox. Powered by Outblaze

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Open Access Initiative
by V. Sasi Kumar 19 May '04

19 May '04

The scientific journal Nature presents some discussions on the Open Access paradigm: Nature Web Focus on "Access to the Literature" http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/accessdebate/ The Green and the Gold Roads to Open Access http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/accessdebate/21.html (Harnad, Bordy, Vallieres, Carr, Hitchcock, Gingras, Oppenheim Stamerjohanns & Hilf) -- V. Sasi Kumar <vsasi(a)hotpop.com>

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Software Patents and India
by rajeev joseph sebastian 19 May '04

19 May '04

Dear friends, I support Pai's call for discussions on patent issues at local groups. I also urge the leadership of the FSF and also the lovers of free software, and freedom in general to rise-up against these series of events. I frankly think that its only awareness that will solve the issue - "they" can't buy them all. Rajeev J Sebastian __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? SBC Yahoo! - Internet access at a great low price. http://promo.yahoo.com/sbc/

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