... We currently maintain funding from the US National Science Foundation in support of OWW. To clarify one point in the recent and fantastic article by Jakob Sukale, the NSF grant expires 30 April 2010. This grant currently pays for Bill [Flanagan]’s salary and our server costs. We are currently underspending on this grant and I will likely ask for a no-cost extension which, if granted, could extend our existing funding runway to April 2011. ...
OWW maintains a statistics page here. There are ~6000 registered OWW users (roughly doubling over the past year). About 50 different users make edits to OWW pages on any given day. About 500 unique users make edits each month. Over 100,000 unique visitors browse OWW each month. This is incredible!
From a different perspective, OWW is incredibly small. We also represent a broader experiment in changing the process of research that is very much in a fragile intermediate stage of its development. ... Stated differently and from a personal perspective, I would currently be hard pressed to make a successful argument that supporting and using OWW has made the research in my own laboratory significantly better, as judged by our traditionally published results. On the one hand, we had a great experience using OWW as a platform for developing a shared reference standard for measuring promoter activity in vivo. On the other hand, using OWW as it exists today has led to increased frustration with the slow inanities to be found within the conventional research publication process, while simultaneously and naively reducing the pressure to publish more formally and enabling others outside the (v. small) OWW community to “borrow” results without giving credit. Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising. All said, I’m more invested in OWW than ever before, and am convinced that we are figuring out a new way to do research. We just have a lot of work to do in order to make the transition complete. ...
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.
