Subscription models make publishers insist on controlling access to research they didn't perform, write up, or fund. They act like a midwives who insist on keeping (or hiding, or performing surgery on) other folks' babies.
Suber's a policy analyst on open access to scientific and scholarly research literature. He's also a Senior Researcher at SPARC, and publisher of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter.
Taxpayers pony up $28 billion annually for NIH to fund medical research, resulting in 60,000 annual published studies. First beneficiaries of that knowledge aren't doctors or patients, but journals that are prohibitively expensive for many.
A new metrics in the works...instead of "impact factor", try "usage factor?" A majority of publishers in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) appear to support "UF."
"Academic literature should be freely available: developing countries need access; part time ... thinkers ... journalists and the public can benefit; ... you’ve already paid for much of this stuff with your taxes ... important new ideas from humanity"
Information Research, is an open access, international, scholarly journal, dedicated to making accessible the results of research across a wide range of information-related disciplines.
DSpace is an open-source digital archiving system designed by MIT Libraries and Hewlett Packard to capture, manage and share research in digital formats.
Leading academics in fields as diverse as biology, computer science, and law have spoken out and taken action for “open access” which includes novel publishing models that do not set up barriers to access, models where neither Wiley nor Elsevier nor e
Our professors do the research. They write the papers and proofread them. They even do the peer review. Then they sign the copyright over to publishers, who don’t pay them a dime —they’re paid by grants and salary, our taxes, and tuition. Harvard th
Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. What makes it possible is the internet and the consent of the author or copyright-holder.
If you support open access to peer-reviewed research articles and their preprints, then read my blog and newsletter. See what's been done and what you can do to help the cause. If you're not sure what open access is, then see my overview.
[H]ere's my prediction for the way future scholars will communicate. The entire process, from lab notebook to final publication, will use the same mass-market blog-like tools that everyone uses for everyday cooperation.
four ways in which science is advanced by Open Access: it enables greater visibility and, as a result, impact; it moves science along more quickly; it enables new 'Web 2.0' semantic technologies to work on scientific output, generating new knowledge by da