SPARC, as well as many other organizations, encourages the development of open access journals, publications that make their articles available at no cost to users and that typically allow users at the very least to make copies in digital form and often confer a wider set of usage rights. Those efforts have had some notable success. For example, the Directory of Open Access Journals website (www.doaj.org) lists over 1600 open access journals containing over 62,000 searchable and downloadable articles. In addition, funders such as the U.S. National Institutes of Health and the Welcome Trust in the United Kingdom are calling for research conducted through their funding to be openly available after some limited “hold back” period. There are many important obstacles for open access publishing to overcome to be a full-fledged market alternative to commercial publishing, including building sustainable economic models and changing the culture of academia to value open access and traditional publication credits equally when considering tenure and promotions. Nonetheless, open access scholarly publishing is already having an effect on the marketplace and, through market mechanisms, has already begun to expand the information commons....[T]he information commons movement has yet to take its place in the mainstream of political discourse. Instead, efforts to guarantee access to the information commons in the face of recent changes in law and technology continue to proceed through the different approaches outlined in this report: legislate, litigate, limit, create competing systems, legally reinterpret, and philosophize and mobilize. We still await the unifying framework that could place the intellectual environment of the information commons on a par with the physical environmental movement in matters of public debate and policy.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/26/2005 07:53:00 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.
