Happy Open Access Day!

Today’s Daily Nebraskan printed a guest editorial written by Kevin and me.  We wanted to use a blog post to back up our editorial and give people access to more information on OA.

The best place to start to learn about OA is Peter Suber.  He has produced some amazing resources on the web for learning about open access.  His OA Overview is fairly comprehenesive, but those faint of heart might try starting with his Very Brief Introduction to OA.  Professor Suber also has a great explanation of what you can do to promote open access from the perspective of faculty, librarians, administrators and students.  And for everything you need to keep up-to-date with current events in OA, check Suber’s blog or newsletter.

There are a couple of videos that help explain some of the major OA issues.  The first is Professor Suber’s talk to the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School.  It’s about an hour and a half long, but totally worth it if you want to understand the growing OA movement on campuses around the country.  Here is another interesting video of Sydney Verba, Director of Harvard University Libraries and professor of political science, and Charles Nesson, Professor of Law about why OA makes sense at Harvard.

I would be remiss if I didn’t highlight a couple of OA journal articles that were very helpful in researching this issue. Jessica Litman at Michigan Law has a great article about the “The Economics of Open Access Law Publishing.”  In addition, Lawrence B. Solum of Illinois College of Law has a very interesting piece about the shift of academic scholarship to shorter articles with greater access for the public.

There is a great OA wiki run by Simmons College.  Some particularly interesting entries include “OA by the numbers,” “OA journal business models,” “Video about OA,” and “University actions” — wouldn’t it be cool for UNL to join the schools on this list.

If you would like to see what a major OA journal looks like, check out the Public Library of Science.  PLoS runs a number of science and medical journals but they have one very interesting journal called PLoS ONE.  This is an interdiscplinary journal that applies principles from the web 2.0 to academic publishing, allowing for comments and ratings to journal articles.  The articles are still peer-reviewed but mainly for accuracy, so that every writing that is technically accurate will be available for users to read, rate, and comment on.  This is an interesting approach to apply the long tail to academic publishing.

For anything else you want to know about OA, the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) is a great resource.  Check out their OA page for articles, newsletters, forums, brochures, and directories of OA journals.

Thanks to Elaine Westbrooks and Joan Barnes for the UNL-specific numbers in the editorial.

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