Lila Guterman, The Promise and Peril of 'Open Access', Chronicle of Higher Education, January 30, 2004 (accessible even to non-subscribers). A major overview of OA, its progress, its critics, and its future. Excerpt: "The good guys, in the eyes of many scientists and librarians, are the revolutionaries offering an alternative to the publishing status quo. They are creating online journals that charge no subscription fees. These agitators for change want to rescue librarians from the tyranny of prohibitively costly journals -- upwards of $20,000 per year -- and to empower researchers who, because of the expense, often have difficulty keeping up with new developments in their fields. Instead of charging subscription fees, the new online journals require the authors to pay, charging fees that range from $500 to $1,500 -- a small sum compared with, say, most biomedical-research grants from the National Institutes of Health."
This Thursday, January 29, from 1:00 to 2:00 pm Eastern time, the Chronicle will host a live online colloquy on open access. I will be the guest and answer questions posed by online readers. The colloquy is open to non-subscribers, and readers may start posting questions at any time. If you can't monitor the colloquy in real time, the Chronicle will publish a transcript afterwards.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/26/2004 09:20:00 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.
