The scientific research community worldwide is gradually adopting the Open Access (OA) publishing model in order to gain wide visibility and impact of its research output. The number of OA articles is rapidly increasing together with the awareness of the benefits of this movement considered as a real cost-effective alternative to the traditional publishing model represented by biomedical commercial and learned society publishers of major STM journals.
In spite of the advantages of this new generation of journals (OA journals) some reluctance to support the OA concept still persists among scientific authors. This is mainly due to the lack of or low value of impact factor (IF) of OA journals which leads researchers to consider them as no high quality sources. Some OA journals are however quickly gaining IF and thus they are becoming more "appealing".
Educating scientific authors regarding the benefits of OA is the core purpose of an ongoing initiative aimed at establishing a pilot group of Istituto Superiore di Sanità (ISS, Italian National Institute of Health) researchers supporting the OA paradigm: their activity as starters of an innovative publishing policy is targeted to favouring OA principles among ISS research staff.
The publishing practice of ISS researchers with respect to OA journals is being investigated with the objective to find the best strategy to educate authors and foster this new model of publication that guarantees free access to research results in favour of the entire scientific community.
Posted by
Gavin Baker at 2/13/2008 07:15:00 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.
