Viable alternatives to for-profit publishing gained steam this year with the popularity of Wikipedia, the successes of the Public Library of Science, a proposal by the National Institutes of Health, and the milestones reached by Project Gutenberg. Open Access publications holds great promise for addressing the hyper-inflating cost information.
Being stifled by profiteering content providers and their legal campaigns against the freedom of information is the greatest obstacle facing libraries today.
(PS: This is exactly right. For more detail on the OA developments in 2004, see my timeline or 2004 review.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/06/2005 09:31:00 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.
