George S. Machovec, Open Access and Scholarly Publishing, Charleston Advisor, January 2004. Introduction to a special issue devoted to open access. Excerpt: "This issue of The Charleston Advisor has a special focus on open access and the scholarly publishing crisis. Libraries are canceling journals at an ever-increasing pace due to declining or static materials budgets and the high price of journals. The scholarly community has acknowledged this dilemma for some time and many new initiatives have arisen to provide alternate publishing models. Initiatives such as local institutional repositories, SPARC (Scholarly Publsing and Academic Resources Coalition), BioMed Centgral, PubMed Central, PloS (The Public Library of Science), BioOne and others have each approached the problem in unique ways. Some initiatives provide low-cost publishing venues for existing societies, others have launched new journals to challenge high-priced commercial counterparts and some use new funding models to pay for their efforts."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 2/09/2004 10:16:00 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.
