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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.

"Today (February 9, 2012), Senators Cornyn (R-TX), Wyden (D-OR), and Hutchison (R-TX) and Representatives Doyle (D-PA), Yoder (R-KS), and Clay (D-MO) introduced the Federal Research Public Access Act, a bill that would ensure free, timely, online access to the published results of research funded by eleven U.S. federal agencies. The Research Works Act, a piece of legislation introduced in December that would ban the government from providing the public access to publicly funded research"

PLoS - The Case for Open Access Open Access

"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."

"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"

The Association of American University Presses does not support the proposed Research Works Act, the group said in a statement released Tuesday. But it also does not support an opposing bill, the Federal Research Public Access Act, which would require public access to the results of federally financed research no later than six months after publication. The other bill would prevent federal agencies from imposing such mandates.

"Today I resigned from the editorial board of a well respected journal in my field - Genomics. No longer can I work for a system that provides solid profits for the publisher while effectively denying colleagues in developing countries access to research findings. It has not been an easy decision. Some may feel that I'm grandstanding or making a futile gesture. And it may be a toxic career move. Scientists are expected to contribute to the community by reviewing papers and serving on editorial boards. But I cannot stand by any longer while access to scientific resources is restricted."

"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?"

Open Access Week Open Access

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".

JISC Inform (UK) article - Open Access

ROARMAP - Registry of Open Access Repositories List of universities and research funding councils, etc. Open Access

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.

"This site hosts the augmented edition of Sharing: Culture and the Economy in the Internet Age, a book by Philippe Aigrain, with the contribution of Suzanne Aigrain, published at Amsterdam University Press as a paper book and as an open access digital monograph. On this site, you can access the source code and datasets used in the book, comment on each of the book chapters, run our economic models for the financing of a sharing-compatible culture with your choice of parameters, and run our diversity of attention analysis software on your own datasets."

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.

UK Open Access Implementation Group

High Energy Physics Open Access Journals Open Access

PLoS ONE Open Access Journals Biggest scientific peer-reviewed journal by publications Open Access

Open Access Newsletter Archive Open Access

Open Access Tracking Project Open Access