This category contains references about several kinds of initiatives whose aim is to free access to peer reviewed scientific papers, namely, "that body of work for which the author does not and never has expected to SELL the words" (S.Harnad) and to promote institutional self-archiving of electronic preprints, in the respect of protocols and standards for electronic archives interoperability.
Aims to accelerate progress in the international effort to make research articles in all academic fields freely available on the Internet. http://www.soros.org/openaccess/
A statement issued in Havana on April 27, 2001, by the participants in the Second Regional Coordination Meeting of the Virtual Health Library and the Fifth Regional Congress on Health Sciences Information. One of the strongest public statements in support http://www.bireme.br/crics5/I/declara.htm
An initiative aiming to construct a digital medium 'as a unified response to our health situation, facilitating wide access to information for the permanent improvement of health of the people'. http://www.bireme.br/bvs/por/ideclar.htm
UNESCO is examining the possibilities of formulating an international strategy for creating and disseminating electronic theses and dissertations. http://www.unesco.org/webworld/etd/index.html
Dedicated to the freeing of the refereed research literature online through author/institution self-archiving. Provides free (GNU) software for self-archiving. http://www.eprints.org/
(FOS) News and discussion on the migration of print scholarship to the internet and efforts to make it available to readers free of charge. Newsletter, forum, FAQ and a comprehensive directory on electronic archives. http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/
Comprehensive guide to the terminology, acronyms, initiatives, standards, technologies, and players in the free online scholarship initiative. http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/guide.htm
A resource for faculty and librarian action to reclaim scholarly communication. Main issues concern subscription prices for scholarly journals and help for journals willing to find publishing options better suited to their academic missions. http://www.createchange.org/
Examines radical alternatives for replacing mass media with network media, abolishing intellectual property, and changing social institutions that create a demand for surveillance. Free full text in html and pdf. http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/pubs/98il/index.html
Answers to frequently asked questions about self archiving including what and how. Has a "I worry about..." set of questions too with advice and answers to issues. http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/
(RoMEO) A project funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee to investigate the rights issues surrounding the self-archiving of research in the UK academic community under the Open Archive Initiative's protocol for metadata harvesting (OAI). Legal http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ls/disresearch/romeo/index.html
An overview of current issues in scientific communication, exploring why scholars are losing control of a system that should be theirs and that is more and more controlled by publishers, chiefly through their pricing and copyright policies. http://www.createchange.org/faculty/issues/quick.html
New electronic and printed resources about scholarly electronic publishing efforts on the Internet. Issues on copyright, academic impact, economical aspects. http://info.lib.uh.edu/sepb/sepw.htm
Considerations on how to build a knowledge network for research communication and on its potential impact, by P. Ginsparg, one of the founders of ArXiv. http://lanl.arxiv.org/blurb/pg01unesco.html
All of Germany's principal scientific and scholarly institutions, including the Max-Planck Society, as well as a growing number of their counterparts from other countries (such as France's CNRS) have signed their commitment to open access to scientific a http://www.zim.mpg.de/openaccess-berlin/berlindeclaration.html
A non-profit organization of scientists committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature freely accessible to scientists and to the public around the world. Promotion of free access online journals and eprints archives. http://www.plos.org/
Article by Steve Lawrence appeared in Nature (2001) analyzing the citation rate of online and off line articles. Articles freely available online are more highly cited, free online availability substantially increases a paper's impact. http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/online-nature01/
Introducing the Street Performer Protocol, an electronic-commerce mechanism to facilitate the private financing of public works. Using this protocol, people would place donations in escrow, to be released to an author in the event that the promised work b http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue4_6/kelsey/
