Elizabeth D'Antonio-Gan, Open Access and the STM Publishing Crisis: A Medical Librarian's View, Charleston Advisor, January 2004. An argument for OA: "[T]he time is ripe for libraries and librarians to become more proactively involved not just as consumers of scientific information but as partners in the Open Access movement to counter the STM publishing crisis." But D'Antonio offers two cautions as well: "One of the challenges to this STM publishing paradigm change lies within the ability of alternative publishers to provide access to its free literature through mainstream scientific indexing services such as Chemical Abstracts, MEDLINE, EMBASE, etc. A secondary challenge is to provide a prestige generating tool for authors to address their need for professional recognition and metrics for promotion and tenure documentation much as the journal impact factor rating does. Over time, as seminal work gets published in Open Access journals and cited authors choose Open Access over the established STM journals, alternate validating tools will most likely be accepted by the scientific community."
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.
