... It's really encouraging to note that the open access movement has taken off in the Philippines, so that from merely blogging about Filipino journals available-for-free-online-but-not-necessarily-open-access in 2005, I am now able to blog about honest-to-goodness Filipino "Open Access Journals," especially "Philippine Studies," whose archives of full-text, peer-reviewed articles now go back to 1970. ...
Yes, open access (OA) is about the FORM of scientific delivery, referring to free online availability of digital scientific contents (mainly research journals) for EVERYONE. Do we really mean EVERYONE here? Including the general public? ... Is OA really serious about delivering scientific contents to the widest possible audiences? We’ve heard it, that is EVERYONE!
Communicating science to the public is a new task for scientific journals. It does require an extension of the OA movement from form to content. Hi, we have new audiences here! OA journals shouldn’t simply throw the same scientific content to the new audience; an effort is needed to present the content in a different way. ...
If we are serious about delivering science to the public through OA, we must start somewhere. Therefore, as the Editor-in-Chief of a Springer OA journal, Nanoscale Research Letters, I’m hereby calling for submissions that address public interests in the abstract, introduction or conclusion, especially for a review-type submission. ... To encourage more NRL submissions that addresses the public interests, any submission that specifies “Open Access Day" in the message to NRL editors and meets the standard, the publication fee of $950 per article will be voluntary for submissions received in 2008. ...
... The purchase of Biomed Central – the largest Open Access publisher – by Springer announced last week, and the announcement of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (*OASPA*) today are strong signs that Open Access has grown up and is no longer new and experimental. ...
Julie Arendt, Open Access Day, Science Librarian Notes, October 14, 2008.
... While I was in library school, I first heard about Open Access when the library I was working at was going through a journal cancellation project. The university had a large, well-funded library system, so they still were far from canceling important journals, but those journal cuts were came after the system had consolidated departmental libraries and changed its staffing patterns to save money. When I finished library school and came to [Southern Illinois University Carbondale], where the money is tighter, it was not surprise that Morris Library was further along in its consolidation and cancellations and a lot closer to cutting important journals -- if it hadn't done so already. Journal prices have been increasing at a rate much faster than inflation for a couple decades, and library budgets haven't been able to keep up.
... I have been writing, talking, preaching about open access of e-resources, software, movement, issues (oh, so many times) on conferences and in practice being as one of the editors of E-LIS/E-prints open access archives, and still believe that OA can make a difference in the publishing world, academia and the freedom of information.
How are you contributing to Open Access, today and every other day during the year? What do you do to support Open Access?
Posted by
Gavin Baker at 10/15/2008 01:52:00 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.
