When Canada's Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) funds scholarly journals, it uses the subscriber tally as a rough measure of worthiness. The result is discrimination against OA journals, regardless of their excellence. Almost exactly a year ago, I reported that International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning faced this kind of discrimination. Gunther Eysenbach now reports that his own Journal of Medical Internet Research has faced the same discrimination. He and other members of the University of Toronto's SSHRC Consultation on Open Access have written a Response to SSHRC on its OA policies. The response recommends not only that SSHRC stop discriminating against OA journals but that it should fund only OA journals. It also recommends that SSHRC mandate OA archiving for all results of SSHRC-funded research not already published in OA journals. (Kudos to the Toronto consultation for these recommendations.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/01/2005 02:57:00 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.
