Libertarian Papers is a new peer-reviewed OA journal of libertarian thought. The inaugural issue from January 2009 is now online. (Thanks to Kimmo Kuusela.) From the about page, a libertarian defense of OA:
[W]herever possible, content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. We even provide [alongside the PDF] the Word file of the article —our “source code”— to make it easier for others to republish, incorporate, print-on-demand, or cut-and-paste (this also gives authors a final copy of their published article in editable form, which is unheard of). We want our ideas read, spread, and copied. As Cory Doctorow notes, “for pretty much every writer—the big problem isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity.” We do not, of course, oppose the profit motive, as some who cling to state-granted intellectual property laws might allege, but we do recognize the stifling effect copyright has had on the communication of ideas. And as spreading the ideas of liberty is the end of our action, in Misesian terms we are indeed seeking a handsome profit by unshackling these ideas to spread them as widely as possible. And in the spirit of open discourse and the free flow of ideas, unlike other academic journals, we allow comments on our articles, via the blog posts announcing them.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/24/2009 01:28:00 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.
