Current Web Contents (CWC) is a new product from Thomson ISI that links to scholarly web sites selected for their authority, accuracy, and currency. A page of examples includes Xiphophorus for the life sciences, ProMED-mail for clinical medicine, and arXiv for physics --all OA resources. CWC itself requires a subscription. Those who also subscribe to Current Contents Connect can search across all the sites selected in CWC. (Thanks to eprintblog.)
Comment. This is a novel extension of the standard journal practice of charging for the evaluation of content for which the publisher pays nothing. If some OA resources are better than others, then the evaluations can help researchers. But note this anomaly: unlike other OA resources, OA repositories do not perform peer review and try to limit the eligibility criteria for inclusion to disciplinary relevance or institutional affiliation. It's misleading to suggest that some repositories are overall or intrinsically of higher quality than others. Because repositories are interoperable, readers should use every one that holds relevant papers and authors should contribute to the most convenient one where they have deposit rights.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 7/10/2005 10:53:00 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.
