The September issue of Walt Crawford's Cites & Insights is now online. By far the largest section in this issue is "Library Access to Scholarship", which is itself mostly devoted to open access. Walt covers the UK and US plans for OA to taxpayer-funded research, the OA experiments at various journal publishers, and several recent articles about OA (including several of my own). Excerpt: "My primary interest in this section is freeing up library funds so academic libraries can maintain humanities subscriptions, buy monographs, other books, and media, provide access to gray literature, maintain technical services and reference librarianship, and in other ways preserve the record of the civilization and maintain themselves as libraries. OA journals can help --if they're represented in library catalogs and when they replace overpriced commercial journals or force those journal publishers to reduce prices. As for OA archives, as far as I can tell, these are likely to have either no effect on library costs or --when they have an effect-- a potentially disruptive effect on scholarly communication."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 8/15/2004 06:34:00 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.
