Formerly a member of the Open Access News team when it was a group blog, Jim is now the author of one of the most thoughtful and thought-provoking blogs on open access on the web: Be Openly Accessible or Be Obscure. What I love about Jim's blog - aside from the delightful name, and wonderful concept - is that his posts are original works, often profound reflections and new perspectives on open access. Jim's work has inspired and sharpened my own thinking on topics such as the economics of article processing fees. Jim often points to particular articles, that are OA - or not, and what the consequences are. If you read my writings often, you may have noticed phrases such as unless you're aiming for obscurity creeping in; definitely an influence!
Jim's first foray into public open access advocacy was in 2000, when he wrote this message to The American Scientist Open Access Forum, where he muses about the difference in self-archiving behavior between physicists and the biomedical community....
Jim's participation in The American Scientist Open Access Forum led to an invitation to publish in a toll-access journal, Learned Publishing, on the topic of self-archiving. This was also his first experience with self-archiving, of the article, Predecessors of preprint servers, Learned Publishing 2001; 14(1): 7-13, available OA in arXiv (with the permission of Learned Publishing).
Jim has already accomplished far more than most of us; prior to CIHR, Jim was instrumental in the development of the Open Access Archive of the Canadian Breast Cancer Research Alliance (CBCRA)....
PS: Thanks, Heather, for celebrating Jim’s long and dedicated work for OA, including his work on OAN. Congratulations, Jim!
Posted by
Peter Suber at 9/05/2007 02:23:00 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.
