... According to Bora [Zivkovic], every revolution in technology expands the proportion of information that becomes sharable. And though scientific journals once served a great purpose, they now effectively limit shared knowledge because they depend on costly resources to produce. With the Internet, ideas about science and research can be shared through every step of the scientific process in a way that is cheap and accessible. ...
... In brief, the concepts underlying open access science are pretty straightforward: (1) All data is free and public. (2) Findings and methods can be portrayed in a variety of web-based mediums. While simple in theory, some consider this risky business. However, the consensus amongst the panel was that open science has many more advantages than fallbacks. For example, outlets like open notebook science allow individuals to depict every detail of their work on a daily basis. This can help other scientists reproduce data and master new techniques more effectively. It can even help scientists in less developed countries gain access to information they could not obtain otherwise. Additionally, preprinting work on sites like Nature Precedings allows researchers to get feedback on their ideas and findings, ultimately subjecting their work to a peer-review process before publication. ...
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.
