The online journal PaleoAnthropology is now being published jointly by the Society and the University of Pennsylvania Museum. As a result, beginning immediately, the journal will be accessible free of charge to everyone, including non-members of the Paleoanthropology Society.
Dues for 2006 have been set at $20....Our situation has been complicated by the fact that the Society’s journal PaleoAnthropology will no longer be published by Penn Press [and will be OA]. Student and regular subscriptions through Penn Press had included both access to the journal and Society dues. For those who made payments for 2006 subscriptions to Penn Press, $20 will be credited to dues; those who paid $30 will be contacted concerning a $10 refund.
Here are a couple of blogger comments. First from John Hawks:
I think this is super cool, and I can't overstate the importance of this in my decision about where to send research. Nothing galls me more than having to stick that "subscription only" reminder next to things I link to, because I know there are a lot of interested people who can't get them.
When news is posted at 1:03am on Sunday mornings, you know it's important... and if you know what's really important to me (you should by now)... open access makes the list....This is extremely good news for the open access movement, and for anthropology in general. Now published works in PaleoAnthropology will be freely accessible to the public. I wonder if someone has told Open Access News of the good news?
I'm very glad to see this for two reasons. First, I personally like having access to these articles. But perhaps more important, I think having them publicly available through open access will go a little way to defuse the nonsense about the cultic nature of science. While I'm not so naive as to think that such articles will be widely read, I do think that scientists should make their works more readily available to the public. At a minimum, the public might come to recognize the difference between a work of science and a piece of religious or political propaganda.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 2/12/2006 10:03:00 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.
