Archive:Open access

=About open access=
 * MUST READ: (Mis)Leading Open Access myths (PDF)
 * Open Access Overview by Peter Suber
 * Brochure for scientists and scholars (PDF) by ARL, et al.
 * Describes benefits of open access to authors, readers, teachers, scholars, and scientists
 * Demonstrates how open access to scholarly research increases an article's use and impact
 * Suggests steps authors can take to provide open access to their work
 * Timeline of the open access movement by Peter Suber

=News=
 * Open Access News - daily blog by Peter Suber
 * SPARC Open Access Newsletter - monthly newsletter by Peter Suber

=Major Iniatives=
 * Alliance for Taxpayer Access
 * For activist groups, non-profits, schools
 * Get your school to sign on to this
 * Library-Related Principles for the International Development Agenda of WIPO
 * Developed by the Association of Research Libraries, American Library Association, and others, of which your school is very likely a part
 * Geneva Declaration on the Future of WIPO
 * Open to anyone (universities, organizations, companies, individuals)
 * Budapest Open Access Initiative
 * Open to anyone (universities, organizations, companies, individuals)

Do you want more?!?

 * Peter Suber's extensive list of ways to help

=Journals=
 * BioMed Central - a prominent open access journal
 * Public Library of Science - publishes open access journals
 * Good ol' Lessig is on the Board of Directors
 * Directory of Open Access Journals - provides a searchable list of free peer-reviewed journals
 * The ArXiv - an electronic pre-print archive. Read the newest articles before they go through the peer review process.

=Courseware=

MIT offers their course materials for free through the MIT OpenCourseWare initiative.

=Quote from Peter Suber=

''We spoke briefly at the "Knowledge Held Hostage" meeting last month in Philadelphia. I wondered whether you'd be willing to add a page about the open-access movement, or at least some links, somewhere on the Free Culture site. You seemed agreeable. It would wonderful if students could be energized for free online research literature as much as they are for free online music and other forms of digital content.''

=Info Dump=
 * BookPower (free only to developing countries)
 * California Open Source Textbook Project
 * CommonText
 * Open Textbook Project
 * Wikibooks
 * FAQ on the NIH public-access plan
 * The Sharon Terry story
 * The Pat Furlong story and the David Lipman story
 * mirror
 * A blogger's story

Info
I have a lot of links on the high and rising prices for textbooks. Let me know if you'd like them as well.

Info
Here's one of my favorites: The genome of the SARS virus was sequenced in about *seven days*, thanks to free and open data sharing by research teams in Canada and the US. By contrast, sequencing the AIDS virus took three years (granted, it was done at a time with less sophisticated tools).

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Here's the connection to OA. Under the current model, people only have access to cutting edge medical research literature if they buy subscriptions or have access privileges through an employer that buys subscriptions. Universities with medical schools have a good collection of medical journals, of course, and their students and faculty have subsidized access. But even these schools can't afford to subscribe to the full range of available journals. And the problem is getting worse all the time: journal prices have been rising four times faster than inflation for the past two decades, . Researchers at universities without medical schools have access to much less. Practicing physicians have access to even less. Individual patients and their families have access to even less.

Here's a little digression.

Non-OA journals charge subscriptions, and the subscription price is an access barrier. It would still be an access barrier if the price was low, but the average price in the sciences is high and getting higher. (See link above; prices in the humanities are still fairly low.) This is often called the pricing crisis, the serials crisis, the serials pricing crisis, the scholarly communication crisis --you'll find many names for it in the literature. I'd be glad to send you more links about the pricing crisis if you like. One family of solutions tries to make journals affordable again. OA finds new ways to pay the bills so that journals are completely free of charge for every user with an internet connection, just as broadcast television is free of charge for every user with a TV. OA also has ways to disseminate articles from high-priced journals in free online archives.