Grant Buckler, Open access: Academia's information sharing future, Information Highways, July/August 2004. A very good survey. Excerpt: "From the writer's viewpoint, though, academic publishing is quite different. Where journalists and novelists are paid for writing and many live on this income, academic journals pay neither the authors of the papers they publish nor their peers who review them....Meanwhile, the Internet removes the printing and distribution costs from the equation....The benefit to researchers is wider readership and more citations, which enhances their reputations. 'People go for what is easily available,' says Andrew Odlyzko, director of the Digital Technology Center at the University of Minnesota, 'and we now have evidence from various studies that papers which are readily available on the net tend to have wider readership.' "
Posted by
Peter Suber at 8/16/2004 10:05:00 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.
