Catherine Candee, Fat Cat Publishers Breaking the System, Syllabus Magazine, May 1, 2004. On OA institutional repositories, especially the California Digital Library and eScholarship Repository.
Excerpt: "Out-of-control costs for scholarly publications have fueled new digital repository initiatives. The scholarly publishing system is broken. At research universities everywhere, scholarly work --in the form of articles, books, editing, reviewing of manuscripts-- is handed over to commercial publishers, only to be bought back by the libraries at huge cost. Libraries scramble to judiciously stretch shrinking budgets for growing runs of books and journals --books and journals that are critical to the research and teaching activities of the university's faculty who, as authors and editors, contribute so generously to the publishers who sell them. The arrangement is bankrupting research library budgets and swelling the profit margins of commercial publishers....Although CDL has never strayed from its original mission, we now have infrastructure in place that allows us to focus on creating systemic change in the way authors and readers work. We have technologies that allow broader, freer, more creative uses of text and data and we can begin to fashion badly needed services for the classroom, office, and lab."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/02/2004 05:00:00 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.
