Once upon a time, academic research was locked down very tightly. Only subscribers could get hold of journal articles and conference papers.
Then along came the open access movement, with its belief that the results of scientific research should be available to anyone, without charge. Backed by scholars and librarians, the movement seeks to get as much research as possible into the public sphere.
Since taxpayers funded research, their argument went, taxpayers should also have access to it.
To facilitate open access, some academics began depositing their work openly on the Web.
This benefits business, general practitioners and medical specialists, students, government, engineers – anyone who needs to access new research. Collections online range from archives of working papers and technical reports to the full text of theses, conference papers and journal articles.
The best tool to find them is OAIster. This acts as a search engine for all the different open access collections registered with the tool.
At present, there are 572, but the numbers grow daily. The service has doubled in size in the past 12 months. It now indexes more than six million items.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/26/2005 09:41:00 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.
