Universal access to all knowledge will be one of humanity’s greatest achievements. We are already well on the way! from Stewart Brand’s: Brewster Kahle’s 30 November Long Now Talk For fun and inspiration, check out the Internet Archive for the more than 3 million books (adding 1,000 titles per day), 100,000 concerts and 1 million recordings (3 new bands uploading / day), 600,000 movies, and of course the web itself. Thanks, Internet Archive and Brewster Kahle – and wow!
2011 has been another outstanding year for the growth of open access to scholarly resources. Highlights this quarter include the remarkable growth of the Directory of Open Access Journals, with an increase of more than 600 titles this quarter alone so far, for a growth rate of 9 titles per day. On November 26, RePEC reached a major milestone. There are now One million works available online through RePEC (Nov. 26, 2011). According to the Sherpa services blog,
60% of journals allow immediate self-archiving of post peer-reviewed articles
and the Open Access Directory just sailed past our 2 millionth view of the OAD.
From my perspective, open access has entered a new phase, one in which we are beginning to see the challenges of success. How can we track all these resources and make it easy for people to find and use them? The emerging open access marketplace for commercial scholarly publishers appears to have attracted what Beall calls predatory open access publishers as I have commented on here. As we begin to address these challenges, it is also timely to begin other overdue discussions, such as Dissension in the Open Access Ranks on CC Licenses.
Sunday, December 11, 2011
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada