Abstract: This paper gives an account of the origin and development of the Open Access Initiative (OAI) and the digital technology that enables its existence. The researcher explains the crisis in scholarly communications and how open access (OA) can reform the present system. OA has evolved two systems for delivering research articles: OA archives or repositories and OA journals. They differ in that OA journals conduct peer review and OA archives do not. Discussion focuses on how these two delivery systems work, including such topics as OAI, local institutional repositories, Eprints self-archiving software, cross-archives searching, metadata harvesting, and the individuals who invented OA and organizations that support it.
(PS: I'm linking to a mirror of the journal because the journal home page doesn't link to any issues published since March 2004. (Hello, ALA!) I got the abstract from Erik Arfeuille's newsletter. I can't tell from the abstract whether the author has coined "Open Access Initiative" to refer to the OA movement or whether she really means the Open Archives Initiative.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/23/2006 10:54:00 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.
