(Photo by dullhunk)

Seats are still available for tomorrow’s (free) talk on “Transformative Change in the System of Scholarly Communication & Publishing Worldwide: the Case for Open Access to Research“. The 3-member panel will speak on the following topics:

Dr. John Willinsky – Why the fuss over open access?
Dr. Francis Ouellette – Why are grant funding agencies advocating for open access to research?
Dr. Carl Bergstrom – Eigenfactor.org: A new methodology for evaluating influence rankings of scholarly articles and journals.

The event takes place on Thursday May 3 from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. at UBC’s Michael Smith Laboratories. To register, please sign up at http://toby.library.ubc.ca/booking/description.cfm?sessionid=3980.

Presented by the BC Research Libraries Group.

Dr. Robert Berwick and his Computation Linguistics Research group at MIT have digitized a microfilm copy of the marked-up version of Noam Chomsky’s complete thesis draft (1955-56) “The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory”.

With Chomsky’s permission, the entire file is downloadable at http://alpha-leonis.lids.mit.edu/chomsky/.

This is the copy Chomsky was preparing for publication as ”The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory”. It contains Chomsky’s hand-written annotations and several chapters and appendices that were left out of the published version of ”The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory”, including an information-theoretic method to construct linguistic categories that Chomsky developed in conjunction with Peter Elias.

The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory was published by University of Chicago Press in 1975; we have two copies in Koerner at P158 .C5 1975.

UBC students and faculty also have access to the electronic copy of Chomsky’s 1955 Ph.D dissertation “Transformational Analysis” (which contain a few chapters from this document) through the Proquest Dissertations and Theses database.

Tomorrow at the Library: Changes in Scholarly Publishing and the Open Access Movement
Friday, Feb 2nd from 12-1pm at Koerner Library.

The scholarly communication system is going through a process of change across the world. Driven by the escalating costs of journal publication, a revolution in authoring and publishing as a result of new technologies, and a feeling that existing models restrict rather than encourage a free flow of information, scholars are re-evaluating the traditional scholarly publishing process in favour of a freer, open access model. This session will describe the building momentum for change in scholarly communication and how it is expressing itself in the Open Access Movement.

For a list of journals in linguistics that have adopted the Open Access publishing model, please see the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) list of Linguistics journals. Journals include the Journal of Intercultural Communication, the Bilingual Research Journal, and the Estudios de linguistica del espanol to name a very few.