"Darren Rhodes" <darren.rhodes5@btopenworld.com> wrote in message
news:ce59h0$lkp$1@titan.btinternet.com...

"JohnWW" <JohnWW@spamsux.co.nz> wrote in message
news:410412AC.5D4E@spamsux.co.nz...

I would like to know if posters on these scientific newsgroups can share
any FTP site(s), or HTTP sites linking to FTP or other protected sites,
including log-in names and passwords, from which chemistry and chemical
engineering and related e-books, publications and programs (not
available to the general public from unprotected HTTP sites) can be
downloaded. These can include, especially, university FTPs.

To start things off, I would like to share:

Here is a link to open access journals http://www.doaj.org/home while

there

are comparatively few chemistry journals it is inevitable that this
situation will change. It cannot be justified either morally or logically
to cling on to the closed access system. Also, people such as yourself

(who

uses) and others who prepare and host the ftp sites that you mention are
putting lots of pressure on the closed access system.

Here is another link that may be of interest
http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north287.html. Libraries are disposing

of

their hardcopy collections all of the time, sometimes giving them away to
other libraries (in less copyright-policed states) - the scanning

described

by the author in the link, again, is inevitable. As to whether the
collections will be available via ftp or via CD for a price that doesn't
include the royalty gouge: I don't know. (Pitifully, it may be possible

to

get the full back issue of a journal before the publisher makes it

available

on-line. The publisher may have to resort to buying a blackmarket CD copy
just to try and retain some sort of credibility). Darren.

ps As an aside, why do authors continue to publish in journals that the
vast majority of people on the planet cannot afford to read? I thought

that

the point was to be as widely read as possible?

meanwhile ... from a list to which I subscribe ...

"Please excuse duplicate posting.

The current (July 30, 2004) issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education has
an article on page A13 entitled "American and British Lawmakers Endorse
Open-Access Publishing" by Andrea L. Foster and Lila Guterman.

Some excerpts:

In a double coup for the open-access movement this month, committees of the
U.S. Congress and British Parliament recommended that papers resulting from
government-financed research be made available free.

The committees recommended that the U.S. and British governments require
researchers to deposit in free, online archives any articles that arise
from research sponsored, respectively, by the National Institutes of Health
and any British agency. The British committee further recommended that
journal publishers adopt an open-access model in which authors would pay to
publish and subscription fees would be eliminated.
....

The recommendation of the Appropriations Committee of the U.S. House of
Representatives is part of a report that accompanies a spending bill for
the Departments of Labor, Education, and Health and Human Services for the
2005 fiscal year. The report says that after an article is published,
researchers' final manuscripts should appear in PubMed Central, a popular
digital archive that is maintained by the National Library of Medicine.

The Association of American Publishers, a trade group that represents most
major book publishers in the United States, is aggressively pressing
members of Congress to gut the open-access language in the report, saying
that the recommendation would threaten publishers' prerogative to decide
when and if to make articles free.

The House Appropriations Committee said that taxpayers currently have
insufficient access to the results of research ...

The report caught the Association of American Publishers by surprise and
prompted what Barbara Meredith, its vice president for professional and
scholarly publishing, described as a two-day lobbying blitz urging members
of Congress to reject the report.
....

Less than a week after the Congressional committee made its
recommendations, the Science and Technology Committee of Britain's House of
Commons released a much-anticipated report that endorsed open access to
research results and criticized the scientific-publishing industry for the
escalating prices of its journals...

The report recommended that government agencies require all researchers
they finance to place copies of their articles in online repositories.

The report discounted criticisms of author-pays journals, such as those
published by the Public Library of Science and BioMed Central, saying that
"the evidence produced so far suggests that the author-pays model could be
viable." But it did outline several concerns about the author-pays model,
including its possibly detrimental effects on scientific societies that
rely on subscription fees to survive and a possible decline in peer-review
standards.

-------------------------------------
"
e-mail address of author removed out of courtesy (I don't know whether or
not he wants to be contacted by people from this list).

So, again; why do authors publish in closed access journals?

Darren.