†Authors relinquish copyright
†Generally, there are no publishing fees, although authors sometimes must pay a page fee for publication.
†Libraries must pay subscription fees for access.
†Authors may negotiate copyright ownership
†Authors pay a publishing fee (typically $500 to $1,500)
†Access is free to all
† Libraries may opt to pay an institutional membership fee to support open access and reduce author fees.
Create Change
An overview of the state of scholarly communication, what is working and what is not.
The Debate on Open Access and Access to Literature: The Debate Continues
Nature publishing provided a forum on open access and is maintaining a number of interesting articles on the subject.
LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe)
The LOCKSS Program has as its mission to build tools and to provide support to
Libraries, so they can easily and affordably create, preserve, and archive local electronic collections.
OAIster
OAIster is a service that provides access to over 3 million records from more than 260 institutions. The project is part of the University of Michigan's Digital Library Production Services. OAIster's search engine provides the means for finding and retrieving documents.
Public Library of Science
The Public Library of Science (PLoS) is a non-profit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource.
PubMed Central
PubMed Central is a digital archive of life sciences journal literature, developed and managed by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM).
SPARC and Open Access
SPARC is an alliance of academic and research libraries and other organizations dedicated to correcting market dysfunction in scholarly communication. On this site are valuable overviews of the SPARC journal project, open access, and institutional repositories. The SPARC Open Access Newsletter is an excellent resource.
A SPARC Position Paper: The Case for Institutional Repositories
". . .institutional repositories offer a strategic response to systemic problems in the existing scholarly journal system- and the response can be applied immediately, reaping both short-term and ongoing benefits for universities and their faculty and advancing the positive transformation of scholarly communication over the long term."