The Agency for Health Research & Quality (AHRQ) has released their public access plan – a response to the OSTP memo of nearly two years ago. Details of the plan are available here: http://www.ahrq.gov/funding/policies/publicaccess/index.html Very briefly: AHRQ states that authors will be required to submit scholarly papers to PubMed Central. AHRQ-funded… read more
Open access
Humanities Open Book grant program
The NEH and the Mellon Foundation are teaming up to offer grants to publishers to turn out-of-print books into freely accessible ebooks. The grant money will be used to secure rights and make the books available online under Creative Commons licenses. Press release: http://www.neh.gov/news/press-release/2015-01-15/humanities-open-book
Dutch universities fight for open access
Dutch universities are fighting to make the work published by their academics open access at no extra charge. They are also unwilling to continue to pay above-inflation cost increases for journal subscriptions. The universities have been negotiating with publishers to come up with plans to meet this goal. Click here… read more
New music and religion journal from Yale
The Yale Journal of Music and Religion will begin publishing on January 1, 2015. This will be an open access journal publishing original research on music, theory, musicology, ethnomusicology, ritual studies, religious studies, theology, and liturgical studies. For more information, please see the journal homepage: http://elischolar.library.yale.edu/yjmr/
Nature makes articles free to read
Nature Publishing Group has announced that it will make Nature and 48 other journals freely available in a read-only format. Subscribers will be able to share an article through a read-only link. Users of that link will be able to view the articles in a web browser but will not be… read more
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation OA policy
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation recently announced a new open access policy that will apply to all articles based on research funded in part or entirely by the Foundation. The policy will require all articles to be freely available online with a CC-BY (or equivalent) license. A 12-month embargo… read more
Interesting new journal selection tool
The Cofactor Journal Selector Tool has been developed to allow researchers to find an appropriate journal for their paper. It allows researchers to select options for subject, peer review process, open access availability, speed of publication, and a few additional miscellaneous categories. After answering the questions (a process that takes… read more
New OA publication for modern languages
Liverpool University Press has announced a new OA publishing platform for scholars in the modern languages. The platform is called Modern Languages Open and currently has sections for Chinese/Asian languages, French and Francophone, German Studies, Hispanic Studies, Italian, Portuguese and Lusophone, and Russian and Eastern European Languages. Access Modern Languages… read more
Pay-it-forward
The University of California Press will be launching a new open access journal that has a very interesting publication funding model. The journal will have a reasonable article processing charge (APC) of about $875. Of that, $250 will go into a pool that will pay editors and reviewers who work… read more
American dissertations from 1933-1955 now online
EBSCO Information Service has recently made the print index, Doctoral Dissertations Accepted by American Universities (DDAAU), available for free at http://www.OpenDissertations.com. The print index was published by the H.W. Wilson Company, who provided financial support for this project. The database covers dissertations that were completed between 1933-1955 at American universities. More information… read more