Elisa Mason, Open Access, Researching Refugees, September 23, 2008.
... How open are forced migration journals ...? I listed 17 periodicals in my forced migration guide that focus specifically on issues relating to forced migration and/or humanitarianism (excluding two that report on statistics). Of these, four make all of their issues available online free-of-charge (Forced Migration Review, Humanitarian Exchange, International Review of the Red Cross, and Journal of Humanitarian Assistance). Three of these titles are not peer-reviewed and are practice- rather than academic-oriented. (The exception is the International Review of the Red Cross, which is peer-reviewed. While its publication was recently outsourced to Cambridge University Press, current issues are still being posted online.)
Several journals adhere to a "delayed open access" policy. For example, issues of Refuge are made available online 12 months after first being published in print. The full-texts of back issues of Disasters, International Journal of Refugee Law, and Journal of Refugee Studies are provided through Forced Migration Online (FMO), typically with a three- to five-year lag time.
So roughly half of these (randomly selected, unrepresentative sample of!) journals and other periodicals are open access to one degree or another. Of course, there are many other journals that publish forced migration articles and that may be open access, such as Conflict and Health and Migration Letters. ...
Open access archives or repositories normally house preprints, conference papers, theses, and other research publications that are not peer-reviewed. Forced Migration Online recently received funding to develop an Open Access Repository System (OARS) and migrate its information resources to an open source platform. This would make its journals (described above) and grey literature digital library more interoperable with other open systems ...
Posted by
Gavin Baker at 9/24/2008 09:12:00 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.
