Abstract: Running scholarly presses as profit centers is becoming increasingly unsustainable as many are barely able to stay solvent in today’s market economy. Under increasing financial pressures university presses are creating a bottleneck for the publishing of scholarly articles, making less of it available more slowly. By restricting access and limiting outlets for publication, today’s commercially structured scholarly publishing system runs counter to the aims of scholarly publishing —to circulate discourse and research findings through academic institutions and into the world. The open access movement is one response to a general failure of the for-profit scholarly publishing system. This paper looks at what it would mean to reconfigure scholarly publishing away from commerce and toward an open access model, and the potential role of libraries within an open access publishing system.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/06/2008 10:50:00 AM.
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.