If you’ve followed this blog at all, you know that we think that open access is an important issue. Too many important scholarly works are locked up behind paywalls where only those with subscriptions may access them. This means a lot of people outside of large research universities run into… read more
Open access
What are we spending on OA?
Green vs gold discussion
The library had a brown bag lunch discussion about green -vs- gold open access (OA) on Friday, April 18th. Green OA is when an author takes a version of their article and adds it to a repository or to another online location to allow for free access (also called self-archiving).… read more
ScienceOpen
There is a new open access publisher called ScienceOpen. The idea behind ScienceOpen is to publish in all areas of science and utilize post-publication peer review. Submitted articles will go through a technical and ethical review and accepted publications are then published online with a DOI after payment of an… read more
An update on public access to federally funded research
The Office of Science and Technology Policy has released an update on the federal government’s work towards making research, including data, more openly available to the public. It specifically provides an update on agency plans for complying with the White House directive. While those plans are still not public, it… read more
Open Access for scholarly books
A nonprofit group called Knowledge Unlatched, has come up with a new model for publishing open access books. In this model, libraries pick titles they would like to be open access and pay a title fee for each of those books. Those fees are meant cover the cost of publishing… read more
Royal Society launching OA journal
The Royal Society of London will launch a new open access journal this fall, Royal Society Open Science (RSOS). RSOS will operate similarly to PLoS One, meaning it will publish research in all areas of science and mathematics and will base peer review on quality of the research, not novelty… read more
Cultural Anthropology Journal goes OA
The Society for Cultural Anthropology (SCA) recently announced that their flagship publication, Cultural Anthropology, would be going open access (OA). Their parent organization, the American Anthropological Association (AAA) had negotiated with Wiley-Blackwell to allow the SCA to become OA even though AAA has a publishing contract with Wiley-Blackwell that runs… read more
Economics of the Scholarly Communication Ecosystem
On January 31st, we had a discussion that was open to all library staff about the Economics of the Scholarly Communication Ecosystem. Those of us in the Open Access Group had been reading about the economics behind open access (OA) publishing, traditional, toll-access publishing, and hybrid publishing. We hoped the discussion… read more
Omnibus Appropriations Bill improves public access to research
The Omnibus Appropriations Bill that was recently passed by Congress, included a provision that will greatly improve access to taxpayer-funded research. Under the bill, federal agencies (with research budgets more than $100 million per year) within Labor, Health, and Human Services and Education will be required to provide the public… read more
