Conference poster. "Nearly one quarter of all full text access at Eastern Illinois University comes from open access sources."

NIH Funding Opportunities and Notices in the NIH Guide for Grants and Contracts: Upcoming Changes to Public Access Policy Reporting Requirements and Related NIH Efforts to Enhance Compliance NOT-OD-12-160. NIH

Stuart Shieber is the Welch Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University, Faculty Co-Director  of the Berkman Center for Interne...

For over two years, much to many people’s surprise, Cooper Union Museum’s and Cooper-Hewitt’s historical publications have been publicly accessible via the Internet Archive. Many of these publications are rare and in some cases, the only known existing copy is held in our National Design Library who worked hard to have them digitized. Sadly, these […]

A lot on the "why" of various kinds of open

Measuring value CREATION rather than value CAPTURE is the key to understanding why free/open is an economic plus.

Academic libraries need to evolve to continue to meet the needs of their users in an open-access world, reports Sian Harris

Occupy is back today, celebrating the first anniversary of S17 with Strike Debt, a movement meant to call attention to the unconscionable levels of debt that many Americans are forced to take on, n…

Open access proponents argue that scholars are far more likely to make their articles freely available online if they are required to do so by their university

Well-supported, somewhat contrarian view of OA choices and bibliometrics, and how they impact developing nations. Often hard to find this kind of discourse!

As we stand on the brink of a new scientific age, how researchers should best communicate their findings and innovations is hotly debated in the publishing trenches.

The university is finding it "increasingly painful" to manage academic-journal subscriptions, which annually cost it about $3.75 million, Mr. Garber said. In a move watched throughout academia, Harvard in April urged its faculty members to publish in open-access journals. "Move the prestige to open access," a memo said.

The trend towards Open Access has catalysed the creation of many new journals and new publishers. BioMedCentral, established in 2000, was a pioneer of open acce

Background In the past few years there has been an ongoing debate as to whether the proliferation of open access (OA) publishing would damage the peer review system and put the quality of scientific journal publishing at risk. Our aim was to inform this debate by comparing the scientific impact of OA journals with subscription journals, controlling for journal age, the country of the publisher, discipline and (for OA publishers) their business model. Methods The 2-year impact factors (the average number of citations to the articles in a journal) were used as a proxy for scientific impact. The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) was used to identify OA journals as well as their business model. Journal age and discipline were obtained from the Ulrich's periodicals directory. Comparisons were performed on the journal level as well as on the article level where the results were weighted by the number of articles published in a journal. A total of 610 OA journals were compared with 7,609 subscription journals using Web of Science citation data while an overlapping set of 1,327 OA journals were compared with 11,124 subscription journals using Scopus data. Results Overall, average citation rates, both unweighted and weighted for the number of articles per journal, were about 30% higher for subscription journals. However, after controlling for discipline (medicine and health versus other), age of the journal (three time periods) and the location of the publisher (four largest publishing countries versus other countries) the differences largely disappeared in most subcategories except for journals that had been launched prior to 1996. OA journals that fund publishing with article processing charges (APCs) are on average cited more than other OA journals. In medicine and health, OA journals founded in the last 10 years are receiving about as many citations as subscription journals launched during the same period. Conclusions Our results indicate that OA journals indexed in Web of Science and/or Scopus are approaching the same scientific impact and quality as subscription journals, particularly in biomedicine and for journals funded by article processing charges.

Prefatory note (2016) Please note that I receive several email requests per week from individuals asking for help or detailed guidance in how to setup an OA journal. With my deepest regrets, I am afraid my time is simply insufficient to provide such guidance beyond what is here on these pages.