Scientific information is both a researcher's greatest
output and technological innovation's most important
resource. Open Access (OA) is the provision of free access
to peer-reviewed, scholarly and research information to
all. It requires that the rights holder grants worldwide
irrevocable right of access to copy, use, distribute, transmit,
and make derivative works in any format for any lawful
activities with proper attribution to the original author.
Open Access uses Information and Communication
Technology (ICT) to increase and enhance the
dissemination of scholarship. OA is about Freedom,
Flexibility and Fairness.
"In an effort to reduce costs for students, the College of Education and Human Development has created this catalog of open textbooks to be reviewed by faculty members.
Open textbooks are complete textbooks released under a Creative Commons, or similar, license.
Instructors can customize open textbooks to fit their course needs by remixing, editing, and adding their own content. Students can access free digital versions or purchase low-cost print copies of open textbooks."
"Readium, a project of the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) and supporters, is an open source reference system and rendering engine for EPUB publications. EPUB is the industry-standard open format for eBooks and digital publications. The latest version, EPUB 3, is based on Web Standard technologies such as HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, SVG, and the DOM. The overall aim of the Readium project is to ensure that open source software for handling EPUB 3 publications is readily available, to accelerate adoption of EPUB 3 as the universal, accessible, global digital publishing format. Readium is built on WebKit , the embeddable open source Web content engine."
"As an up and coming academic, I'm willing to put my career on the line and promise to only publish in open access journals. Putting my career on the line is a very real threat, since many departments look for publications in key (generally not open access) journals such as American Anthropologist when hiring. However, I'm confident that the people who will be evaluating me will overlook those issues if they understand why I made this choice, and will evaluate my work on its own merits and not on the journal that publishes it"
" Openness - concepts like open content, open data, and open resources, along with notions of transparency and easy access to data and information - is moving from a trend to a value for much of the world. As authoritative sources lose their importance, there is need for more curation and other forms of validation to generate meaning in information and media."
"That's what you have to reckon with. Helped along by technology, that open culture has grown much stronger in the 10 years since another scholarly boycott aimed at publishers helped create the open-access Public Library of Science. Its flagship journal, PLoS One, published almost 14,000 articles last year, according to its publisher, Peter Binfield. "
The entire field of particle physics is set to switch to open-access publishing, a milestone in the push to make research results freely available to readers.
Particle physics is already a paragon of openness, with most papers posted on the preprint server arXiv. But peer-reviewed versions are still published in subscription journals, and publishers and research consortia at facilities such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have previously had to strike piecemeal deals to free up a few hundred articles.
The European Union is set to throw the weight of its €80 billion (£64 billion) research funding programme behind open-access publishing, Times Higher Education has learned.
An official at the European Commission, which is drafting proposals for the Horizon 2020 programme, said that for researchers receiving funding from its programme between 2014 and 2020, open-access publishing "will be the norm".
"The open comment period ended last month. Much of the feedback came from two camps: libraries and universities, on the one hand; and scholarly associations and the companies that publish their peer-reviewed journals, on the other. A casual survey of the letters suggests that the feedback largely breaks along familiar lines - librarians arguing for quicker and easier access to research, and publishers offering suggestions for better access while discouraging measures that might threaten their subscription revenues."
"Open access is framed as a moral issue, but it's actually a business one. Arguments that tax-payer funded research should be publicly accessible can seem obvious; but what if tax-payer funding is not available or is not adequate to cover the costs-as is usually the case in the arts and humanities?"
I am making a public commitment to try to get tenure at UIC only publishing in Open Access journals.
Why is this scary? I'm at a R1 institution and a huge portion of my tenure evaluation is my ability to publish. I'm absolutely in a publish or perish situation for the next four years and that's a big red flashing deadline at the top of the really long to do list.