text: As a trivial example, authors of OA publications can legally distribute copies of their papers - sort of handy if you're a scientist, eh? :-) With most Open Access publishers, the author does not transfer copyright to the publisher but rather licenses it to them under a Creative Commons License. In other words, the author retains the right to do whatever they want with the paper: they can copy+paste the text into their blog (insert example here if someone can send me one), they can insert the paper as an appendix to another publication (as I did with the Open Babel book), they can magnify it to A0 size and present it as a poster or art installation or whatever... (I've sometimes wondered why Open Access journals don't make more capital out of this difference between themselves and closed journals - for example, they could hand out the top 10 most accessed papers at conferences.)
  Well, in the spirit of exercising my right to recycle my OA papers as I like, I've put together a book (well, a PDF at least) consisting of the various PDFs stitched together with a Table of Contents. Here is the result (a 15MB PDF)
  If I wanted to, I could upload this to Lulu and allow people to order a copy in the post, all nicely bound with a cover. Maybe another day.
  Open publication - Free publishing
  Notes: The PDF was created based on comments on the Debian message board. To avoid confusion over page numbers, I added the short form of the appropriate reference to the footer of all of the papers. The following Python script was used to automate some of the steps:
  import os latex="""\\documentclass[12pt,a4paper]{book} \\usepackage{multido} \\usepackage[hmargin=.8cm,vmargin=0.5cm,nohead,nofoot]{geometry} \\usepackage[explicit]{titlesec} \\newcommand*\\Hide{%% \\titleformat{\\chapter}[display] {}{}{0pt}{\\Huge\\thispagestyle{empty}} \\titleformat{\\part} {}{}{0pt}{} } \\begin{document} \\pagestyle{empty} \\title{Open Access Publications of\\\\Noel O'Boyle} \\maketitle \\tableofcontents %s \\end{document} """ data = { "BO.pdf": [15, """Open Data, Open Source and Open Standards in chemistry: The Blue Obelisk five years on N. M. O'Boyle, R. Guha, E. L. Willighagen, S. E. Adams, J. Alvarsson, J.-C. Bradley, I. V. Filippov, R. M. Hanson, M. D. Hanwell, G. R. Hutchison, C. A. James, N. Jeliazkova, A. S. I. D. Lang, K. M. Langner, D. C. Lonie, D. M. Lowe, J. Pansanel, D. Pavlov, O. Spjuth, C. Steinbeck, A. L. Tenderholt, K. J. Theisen and P. Murray-Rust. J. Cheminf. 2011, 3, 37."""], "GM.pdf": [12, """Userscripts for the life sciences E. L. Willighagen, N. M. O'Boyle, H. Gopalakrishnan, D. Jiao, R. Guha, C. Steinbeck and D. J. Wild. BMC Bioinformatcs. 2007, 8, 487."""], "Cinfony.pdf": [10, """Cinfony - combining Open Source cheminformatics toolkits behind a common interface N. M. O'Boyle and G. R. Hutchison. Chem. Cent. J. 2008, 2, 24."""], "Confab.pdf": [9, """Confab - Systematic generation of diverse low-energy conformers N. M. O'Boyle, T. Vandermeersch, C. J. Flynn, A. R. Maguire and G. R. Hutchison. J. Cheminf. 2011, 3, 8."""], "AntColony.pdf": [15, """Simultaneous feature selection and parameter optimisation using an artificial ant colony: case study of melting point prediction N. M. O'Boyle, D. S. Palmer, F. Nigsch and J. B. O. Mitchell. Chem. Cent. J. 2008, 2, 21."""], "DataAnalysis.pdf": [2, """Review of ``Data Analysis with Open Source Tools" N. M. O'Boyle. J. Cheminf. 2011, 3, 10."""], "MACIE2005.pdf": [2, """MACiE: a database of enzyme reaction mechanisms G. L. Holliday, G. J. Bartlett, D. E. Almonacid, N. M. O'Boyle, P. Murray-Rust, J. M. Thornton and J. B. O. Mitchell. Bioinformatics. 2005, 21, 4315-4316."""], "MACIE2007.pdf": [6, """MACiE (Mechanism, Annotation and Classification in Enzymes): novel tools for searching catalytic mechanisms G. L. Holliday, D. E. Almonacid, G. J. Bartlett, N. M. O'Boyle, J. W. Torrance, P. Murray-Rust, J. B. O. Mitchell and J. M. Thornton. Nucleic Acid Res. 2007, 35, D515-D520."""], "OB.pdf": [14, """Open Babel: An open chemical toolbox N. M. O'Boyle, M. Banck, C. A. James, C. Morley, T. Vandermeersch and G. R. Hutchison. J. Cheminf. 2011, 3, 33."""], "PyChem.pdf": [2, """PYCHEM: a multivariate analysis package for python R. M. Jarvis, D. Broadhurst, H. Johnson, N. M. O'Boyle and R. Goodacre. Bioinformatics. 2006, 22, 2565-2566."""], "Pybel.pdf": [7, """Pybel: a Python wrapper for the OpenBabel cheminformatics toolkit N. M. O'Boyle, C. Morley and G. R. Hutchison. Chem. Cent. J. 2008, 2, 5."""] } order = [["Cheminformatics toolkits", ['Pybel', 'Cinfony', 'OB']], ["Enzyme reaction mechanisms", ['MACIE2005', 'MACIE2007']], ["QSAR", ['PyChem', 'AntColony']], ["The Rest", ["GM", "Confab", "DataAnalysis", "BO"]] ] def formatjournal(text): """Format the journal metadata >>> formatjournal("Chem. Cent. J. 2008, 2, 5.") '\\\\textit{Chem. Cent. J.} \\\\textbf{2008}, \\\\textit{2}, 5.' """ broken = text.split(" ") pages = broken[-1][:-1] year = broken[-3][:-1] volume = broken[-2][:-1] journal = " ".join(broken[:-3]) return "\\textit{%s} \\textbf{%s}, \\textit{%s}, %s." % (journal, year, volume, pages) def test(): import doctest doctest.testmod() if __name__ == "__main__": # Sanity checks N = 0 for x, y in data.iteritems(): assert os.path.isfile(x) N += y[0] assert len(data) == sum(len(y) for x, y in order) # Write latex output = [] for a, b, in order: output.append("\\part{%s}{\\Hide" % a) for paper in b: pages, biblio = data["%s.pdf" % paper] broken = biblio.split("\n") title = broken[0] output.append("\\chapter{%s}" % title) authors = broken[2] journaldata = formatjournal(broken[3]) output.append("""\\multido{}{%d}{\\null\\vfill %s \\newpage}""" % (pages, journaldata)) output.append("}") with open("generated.tex", "w") as f: f.write(latex % "\n".join(output)) # Join Papers together pages = 1 paper_idx = 1 names = "A=generated.pdf" cat = "A2 A2 A2 A2" pages += 4 for a, b in order: cat += " A2 A2" pages += 2 for paper in b: # New chapters always on odd-number pages if pages % 2 == 0: cat += " A2" pages += 1 ## print pages paper_idx += 1 papername = chr(64+paper_idx) names += " %s=%s.pdf" % (papername, paper) cat += " %s" % papername pages += data["%s.pdf" % paper][0] print >> open("run.bat", "w"), "pdftk %s cat %s output combined.pdf" % (names, cat) print """Now run... pdflatex generated pdflatex generated run.bat pdftk combined.pdf burst output tmp\\file_%03d.pdf pdftk generated.pdf burst output tmp\\numbers_%03d.pdf bash-3.2$ cd tmp && for i in `seq -w 1 109`; do pdftk file_$i.pdf background numbers_$i.pdf output new-$i.pdf; done pdftk tmp\\new-???.pdf output new.pdf """