Abstract: Authors do not write research or scholarly articles for any immediate monetary gains. They write to tell their peers about their research findings. However, the conventional scholarly publishing culture does not support authors’ desire to be read widely. Internet is providing an alternative to conventional publishing in the form of “Open Access”. There are two approaches to provide Open Access to scholarly and research literature. These are Open Access journals and Open Access repositories. In both of these approaches, authors desire to be widely read is fulfilled. They are more visible and likely to be better cited as compared to the conventional publishing culture. The paper discusses the broad meaning of Open Access and its two basic approaches. It also discusses status of Open Access in regard medical sciences with special reference to India. Authors stand to gain through this new culture of scholarly publishing. Availability of Open Access biomedical content also facilitates new methods of content aggregations and data mining and thus would give new dimension to medical informatics.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/24/2007 11:33:00 AM.
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.
