ScientificCommons aims to provide the most comprehensive overview of scientific articles and contributions available on the internet. The major goal is to enable the free distribution of scientific knowledge to anyone. The growing number of Open Access Repositories worldwide with their vast number of scientific contributions are the source for ScientificCommons.
The lack of licences for scientific periodicals continues to be a major impediment to the fast access of current research results and thus not only hinders the swift spread of knowledge but also the research itself. In the last few years a movement was established under the keyword "Open Access" which aims to make scientific articles available to interested persons over the Internet free of any charge. The focus is especially on those publications which appear in approximately 24'000 scientific journals (peer-reviewed) world-wide. To achieve this ambitious goal, two approaches appear feasible [green and gold, or OA archives and OA repositories]...Looking at the practicability of these two approaches it becomes apparent that the barriers for [OA repositories] are considerably lower. The majority of the publishers (more than 90 percent) are already permitting the self-archiving of one's own publications....
PS: For a new service, ScientificCommons is very close to OAIster in its coverage. According to an entry posted yesterday to Open access by the numbers (a section within the Wikipedia article on open access), ScientificCommons currently indexes 8,275,984 records harvested from 573 repositories, compared to OAIster's 9,624,092 records from698 repositories. Repositories not yet covered are invited to sign up for harvesting.
Congratulations to Beat F. Schmid, Thomas Nicolai, and Lars Kirchhoff who run the project from Switzerland's University of St. Gallen.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/24/2006 01:38:00 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.
