Colin Steele and Bobby Graham, Scholarly publishing: digital dreams or nightmares?Australian Bookseller & Publisher, October 2004. A general survey of the state of digital scholarship in Australia, of which OA is just one part. Excerpt: "In October 2003, the Department of Education Science and Training (DEST) granted AU$12 million to various electronic initiatives, including digital theses promotion and the population of institutional repositories. The funding will allow two consortia, headed by ANU and Monash University, to explore, over the period 2003-2005, the potential of digital publishing technologies linked to global networking and international open access. ANU E-Prints recorded 209,401 downloads of scholarly material out of 661,116 hits in the first half of 2004 from a base of just over 2,000 documents. The global Open Access movement, most notably reflected in the July UK House of Commons report, Scientific Publications: Free for All?, has seen significant progress in a number of countries at policy levels ranging from Germany to Canada. A significant portion of scholarly publishing in the future will no doubt come under the umbrella of 'public funding, public knowledge, public access'. This will benefit citizens of the first as well as the developing world. Evidence from those publishers who provide material free of charge on the web such as MIT, University of California and Columbia University Presses is that free access to books on the web, actually generates more conventional book sales than would otherwise be the case."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/04/2004 08:06:00 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.
