Lee van Orsdel and and Kathleen Born, Periodicals Price Survey 2004: Closing in on Open Access, Library Journal, April 15, 2004. A good review of the consequences of rapidly rising journal prices, and an excellent compendium of recent pricing data. Excerpt: "The fate of the Big Deal won't be decided by one renewal season, but there are other signs that the extreme-profit model in the scholarly communications market is about to meet serious competition. The competition is advancing under the flag of the Open Access/Open Archives Initiative (OAI). The movement draws its passion from the belief that the monopolistic pricing of the current system seriously limits access to information and threatens an important public good. By restoring copyright to authors and by providing free and global access to scientific information, open access seeks to break the stranglehold of scientific, technical, and medical (STM) publishers. While the economics of the new model are going to be debatable for some time to come, the movement has accrued positive attention in venues both inside and outside of the academy. If the OAI movement succeeds in creating competition as hoped, it may be the long-awaited antidote to skyrocketing journal costs." (PS: OA and OAI overlap in their missions and acronyms, but they are distinct. OA is basically free online access. OAI is a campaign to use a certain metadata harvesting protocol for online archives, most of which are OA. But not all OA is embodied in OAI-compliant archives, and not all OAI-compliant archives are OA.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 4/22/2004 02:48:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
