My personal interest in being possibly one of the founding members of this organization (which also may include BioMed Central, Copernicus, Co?Action Publishing, Hindawi, Medical Education Online, Journal of Medical Internet Research, PLoS, and presumably others) is the recognition that some sort of organization is needed to set, promote and enforce professional and ethical standards and OA publishing practices....
But it is important that such an organization is set up and run not to primarily defend the commercial interests of large commercial publishers, but to act as much as possible in the interest of scholarly communication (these are not mutually exclusive goals - but they are not always aligned....)
More specifically, [OASPA is] contemplating the following rules:
Each publisher gets one voting member and an additional voting member for every additional 250 OA manuscripts published in the previous calendar year up to a maximum of 10.
In other words, this will ensure that large publishers have 10 times more votes than small publishers....
PS: See my own comments on the draft OASPA bylaws.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 7/21/2008 12:22:00 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.
