Dean Giustini is writing a two-part history of the OA movement in Canada. Part I came out today: Early Canadian Involvement to 1999. Excerpt:
Canada’s involvement in the open access (OA) movement can be traced back to the early 1990s. In 1991, Jean-Claude Guédon of the Université de Montréal founded Surfaces, the first Canadian electronic scholarly publication.
Another prominent Canadian in OA is University of Toronto's Leslie Chan. He serves as the Associate Director of Bioline International, a not-for-profit electronic publishing service committed to providing open access to quality research journals published in developing countries, thus reducing the south to north knowledge gap....
In 1997 Harnad founded CogPrints, one of the early OA repositories, which was made OAI-compliant in 1999....Harnad's students and collaborators have amassed evidence of the usage and citation advantage of open access as a basis for promoting it....
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.
