Summary points: [1] Authors should be prioritising open access to their works —for the good of other scientists and to ensure that the full benefits of the internet and advanced technology may be realised. [2] Open access is rapidly becoming a mainstream idea in scholarly publishing, with more than 2000 open access journals and more than a million author self archived open access papers. [3] Legal and technical barriers to open access are easily overcome using freely available tools.
From the conclusion:
Authors have several resources, including open access journals, open access archives, educational materials, and legal tools, that make open access easy and legal to achieve. Although open access has made considerable progress, and more scholarly work is publicly available than ever before, most peer reviewed articles remain closed to both human study and indexing by software. Authors, institutions, funders of research, and scholarly publishers should continue the movement towards open access so that no scholar is disadvantaged by his or her economic status and so that the full value of technological progress can be applied to the scholarly literature.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/22/2006 09:25:00 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.
