Nancy Davenport, Open Access Is the Buzz, CLIR Issues, November/December 2004. Excerpt: 'The open-access system presents scholars with many unanswered questions: Will my work be more or less accessible to the readers I want to reach? How will publishing in an open-access mode affect my professional standing? Will my work be cited as often in prestigious journals or mentioned as frequently by others noted in the field? Will peer review be faster or slower? Will my work get to "print" faster? Should I start publishing now in open access, getting in early while new journals are developing their reputations, or should I wait to see how it sorts out? If everyone is publishing in open access, how will I find the new work of other scholars whose work I need to read? Do I really care if my work is accessible to the public since that is not my primary audience? If open access means I have to pay preprocessing costs, where do I get the money? If I start publishing my work in open-access formats will I still get the grants I want?' (PS: I don't deny that these questions may be on the minds of many scholars. But it's remarkable how easy most of them are to answer, and how the answers favor OA. We still have a lot of educating to do.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/17/2004 09:52:00 AM.
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.
