LISNews: Power Influencer, Passion Catalyst

Gaining Independence: A Manual is a publication of SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, which is dedicated to helping transform the scholarly communications marketplace and process.

SPARC intends this manual to help universities, libraries, societies, and others implement alternatives to commercially-published scholarly and scientific information.

steven bell writes \"A recent story that appeared in the Harvard Crimson, Harvard\'s school newspaper, highlighted the efforts of three medical school faculty to encourage scholarly journals to make create free access to online articles after a six month embargo period. Despite obtaining 15,000 signatures to a petition, the effort has made little progress towards its goal. You can find the story at UWiretoday.com.
\"

Lee Hadden writes \" Chemical Engineering and News has an interesting account in their
\"Newscripts\" column in the back of the journal. The issue for January 14,
2002, on page 48, has the item \"Free Car Carries Surprising Baggage.\"
The author of a popular text, \"Rapid Interpretation of EKG\'s,\" wrote
in the 50th printing an insert among the copyright legalese boilerplate. In
this insert, he offers a free car shown on page 46 to the people who send
their name and address to the publisher, and who\'s name is pulled out of a
hat.
Only 5 people responded out of the 60,000 copies sold, and Jeffrey
Seiden won the prize- a shiny red 1965 Ford Thunderbird, with only 16,000
miles on it, worth $20,000.00.
However, it turned out that this was not a Yale University matter
although reported in the New Haven Register. Author Dale Dubin had lost his
medical license and served five years in federal prison for selling drugs
and possession of child pornography. He had been released in 1989.
If you have an account with the American Chemical Society, you can
read more about it at: pubs.acs.org/cen

\"

Lee Hadden writes: \"Today\'s Wall Street Journal, January 28, 2002, has an article on page
B1 by Gautam Naik, \"BioTech Firm Bypass Journals to Make News.\"
The article discusses the increasingly common trend of announcing the
results of experiments, not in refereed science journals, but in press
releases. The end result is the public is exposed to claims which may be
exaggerated or worse, undermining the authority of the rest of the
scientific community.
\"It used to be that a scientific breakthrough was taken seriously only
if it first appeared in a peer-reviewed journal. But in the race to grab
the spotlight, some companies are rushing to release information via
esoteric publications that have less-stringent criteria or in news
releases.\"
Read more about it at: wsj.com\"