My humble #pdftribute

I am a newcomer as free culture user and producer, but thanks to the Master on Libre Software that I studied these last two years, and many people that I try to follow (reading their blogposts, at identi.ca, reading research articles…) I have become quite quickly an enthusiastic supporter of free licenses, both for software and for culture. I am interested in “open access”, and dissemination of the teaching and research material produced at the University where I work, and the University where I study (if you can understand Spanish, this is my contribution at job (UPM), and this is my volunteer colaboration at URJC).

Before than he passed away, I had heard about Aaron Swartz, I would say he was related somehow with Reddit and Creative Commons, but didn’t know much more about him. Now I have read a bit, and I also want to share my humble #pdftribute.

I have only one paper published, and here you are, “Mining for Localization in Android”. For several reasons (laziness and FUD, mostly) I didn’t publish it earlier. Now I feel very ashamed of myself but I hope “better late than never”.

To fight this FUD of mine (and maybe others), I haver digged a bit about publishing papers “in the open” when you, as author, already had transferred the copyright to a different entity. What you should do? First, of course, to read the copyright assignment you signed when you submitted the paper.

In my case (IEEE is the publisher and the copyright owner) the copyright policy is quite clear explaining that it is possible for authors to publish their submmitted versions of the articles (“camera-ready” version) in their websites and the websites of their employers, if they include a copyright notice and the DOI (Digital Object Identifier) to the “original” published version at the IEEE website.

Wow. This is a great news, because “employer’s website” includes the Universities Digital Archives.

If you are still in doubt, or you deal with other publishers, you can search the Sherpa/RoMEO engine to learn the copyright policies of each publisher.

So this is my humble tribute to Aaron Swartz: to generate the preprint and upload my paper (and the future ones) to the University Digital Archive where they will be accessible with a permanent URL (Mining for Localization in Android at URJC Digital Archive), try to convince others to do the same, and fight FUD at the same time that promote the Free Culture and Open Science.

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