Prepping for your Graduate Record Exams? Here's a sample essay topic from a GRE study guide:
All results of publicly funded scientific studies should be made available to the general public free of charge. Scientific journals that charge a subscription or newsstand price are profiting unfairly.
See GRE Exam 2009 Edition Comprehensive Program, Kaplan Publishing, June 2008, p. 231. (Thanks to Amber Smith for the discovery.)
I just mailed the February issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter. This issue takes a close look at four analogies between the political fortunes of open access and the political fortunes of clean energy.
The roundup section briefly notes 116 OA developments from January.
Here's a quick overview of the four analogies:
The gap between breakthrough and uptake
Putting obstacles in our way
Slowing down to protect the incumbents
Some pay for all
Update (3 hours later). A list problem has snagged delivery of the email edition. Apologies for the delay. Meantime, the online edition (link above) is the same as the email edition and already available.
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.
