It's one thing to support open-access publishing. It's another to provide open access.
What research worldwide needs urgently today is not the money to pay OA journals but OA itself. (Most of the potential money to pay OA journals is currently tied up in paying for non-OA journal subscriptions.)
Comment. Of course OA journals do provide OA itself, and I applaud the Berkeley OA journal fund. But I also join Stevan in hoping that Berkeley will adopt a green OA mandate like Harvard and a growing number of other universities. Note that the whole U of California system, including Berkeley, has been considering an OA mandate since 2005. (For details, see the postscript to my March 2008 article on the Harvard mandate.) When the Harvard mandate was adopted in February 2008, Gary Lawrence, the UC director of systemwide library planning, told the Chronicle of Higher Education that "Harvard's success in creating an arrangement that faculty members agreed on provides us a lot of encouragement."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/17/2008 12:17:00 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.
