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The movement towards Open Access (free, online access to scholarly works) received a big boost this week. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard voted unanimously to make their scholarly articles available online for free. The library will oversee a newly created Office of Scholarly Communication that will handle the project.

Visit Dibner Library’s links on delicious for more information on Open Access.

In accordance with a new spending bill signed by President Bush last month, all research funded by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) will now be required to be published online, free to the public, within 12 months after publication in any scientific journal. Seeing as NIH has a $29 billion research budget, this new directive should open up a world of new opportunities for online research.

Source: ReadWriteWeb

Open Access publishing continues to rise at an astronomical rate as researchers hope to maximize their impact by providing free access to their scholarly articles online. But all this newly available material does little good if you don’t know where to find it. Fortunately the good folks at Lund University in Sweden have created the Directory of Open Access Journals.

The Directory of Open Access Journals is a carefully vetted list of fully open access, peer-reviewed scholarly journals covering all subjects and languages. It currently lists a total of 2,870 journals, with a net growth rate of 1.2 titles per calendar day over the past year. The directory aims to be a “one stop shop for users to Open Access Journals.”

Subjects covered in the Directory include: [Read more →]

With the rise of Open Access and advances in cyberinfrastructure, scholarly communication is in the midst of upheaval. What will this mean for the academic world, the research community, and the advancement of science overall? These are some of the questions addressed by that the latest issue of CTWatch Quarterly: “The Coming Revolution in Scholarly Communications & Cyberinfratructure”

CTWatch Quarterly is an online journal that focuses on cyberinfrastructure related research critical to collaboration and information dissemination within the science community. Past issues are available online in the Issues Archive.