After a few months of community comment and collaboration, ResearchBlogging officially launched on January 21, 2008. From the about page:
Do you like to read about new developments in science and other fields? Are you tired of "science by press release"? Research Blogging is your place. Research Blogging allows readers to easily find blog posts about serious peer-reviewed research, instead of just news reports and press releases.
How it works
Bloggers -- often experts in their field -- find exciting new peer-reviewed research they'd like to share. They write thoughtful posts about the research for their blogs.
Bloggers register with us and use a simple one-line form to create a snippet of code to place in their posts. This snippet not only notifies our site about their post, it also creates a properly formatted research citation for their blog.
Our software automatically scans registered blogs for posts containing our code snippet. When it finds them, it indexes them and displays them on our front page -- thousands of posts from hundreds of blogs, in one convenient place, organized by topic.
The quality of the posts listed on our site is monitored by the member bloggers. If a post doesn't follow our guidelines, it is removed from our database. Borderline cases may be discussed in our forums.
We also provide bloggers with an icon they can use to show when they're talking about a peer-reviewed work that they've read and analyzed closely....
If you're a blogger who writes about serious research, Research Blogging offers you a way to distinguish your serious posts from news, politics, family, bagpipes, and so on. We can direct your regular readers -- and new readers -- to the posts you've worked the hardest to create. All you need to get started is a blog and our guidelines... and a peer-reviewed research report that you'd like to discuss.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/26/2008 05:19:00 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.
