The US Education Resources Information Center (ERIC) is digitizing 40 million pages of microfiche documents and providing OA to as many as it can. From Barbara Quint's story in today's Information Today NewsBreaks:
More large-scale digitization projects continue to emerge as aggregators move to extend their digital archives. The National Archive Publishing Co. (NAPC) has announced a 2-year project by which they will digitize a backfile of microfiche reports in ERIC (Education Resources Information Center). All documents date from 1966 to 1992 —about 340,000 documents or 40 million pages. Due to a conservative interpretation of contract language used until 1993 for submitting documents to ERIC, the project will also involve chasing down copyright holders, both corporate and individual authors, for permission to offer access to the electronic documents. Though the digitization will proceed independent of the permission-seeking process, the availability of full-text PDF files of the documents (free at the ERIC Web site) will depend on securing permission....
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.
