[A] publishing milestone occurred this year. In a world where the top scientific journals can cost subscribers over $10,000 per year, an online science journal with a subscription price of $0 won a 13.9 impact-factor rating from the prestigious Thomson Scientific...citation-counting service (Institute for Scientific Information), which acts as the Nielsen ratings of science publishing. That rating placed PLoS Biology among the top journals in its category, although it was only two years old.
The non-profit Public Library of Science currently publishes four journals that embody the principles of the Open Access movement, making peer-reviewed medical and scientific research available worldwide for free, under the Creative Commons license. In place of subscriptions, the authors themselves (or their funding agencies) cover the costs of online publishing, to the tune of about $1,500 per article. The Directory of Open Access Journals lists 1,761 publications that meet its criteria as “free, full-text, quality-controlled scientific and scholarly journals.”
A second approach to open access publishing is called “author self-archiving.” Following this so-called “green road,” the author publishes the article in a traditional journal, but retains the rights to post it in an open-access repository. Harnad, who edits the American Scientist Open Access Forum, has advocated this approach. He has argued that self-archiving frees up research more quickly than waiting for every journal (and every scientist) to convert to a new business model. Maximize access to research and you maximize its impact, goes the argument. [Savarese then gives details on some OA repositories and related tools and policies.]
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/03/2006 01:34:00 PM.
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.
