Open
Access and Scholarly Publishing:
Trends and Opportunities
The open access model in scholarly publishing
is a cost-effective way to disseminate research. This
model, made possible by new technologies, is an alternative
to subscription-based publishing which allows peer-reviewed
research to be made freely available on the public Internet
for the purposes of education and research. Authors
retain control over their work and have the right to
post their scholarship on institutional or disciplinary
servers, or transfer to publishers the right to make
their work freely available on the web. E-print servers
are already well known to physicists and mathematicians,
while biologists are now being exposed to these new
publishing models brought forward by publishers such
as BioMed Central and the Public Library of Science.
A recent article in the newsletter of the American Society
for Cell Biology explains ASCB's commitment to open
access publishing. Find it at http://www.ascb.org/news/vol26no2/ns/February-03_2.html.
York University Libraries support such
ventures by cataloguing open access journals and making
their contents available to researchers via the Libraries'
website. On a trial basis, the Libraries have also agreed
to cover author charges for publishing in BioMed
Central journals. Three York faculty members have
already published in BMC journals: Professors Saber
Saleuddin and Chun Peng from Biology/FPAS and Professor
Georgina Feldberg from the Centre for Health Studies.
It is hoped that others will avail of this opportunity.
Articles are peer-reviewed and are indexed in PubMed
(Medline) and selectively in ISI's Web of Science,
Biological Abstracts and Chemical Abstracts.
To start a discussion on open access publishing,
librarians will also participate this fall in a miniseries
being sponsored as part of the Brown Bag Research Seminar
series at Atkinson College.
Open
Access and Scholarly Publishing miniseries
Tuesday,
September 30, 12:00 - 2:00 pm
Professor Stevan Harnad, Centre de Neuroscience
de la Cognition, UQAM and current editor of Behavioral
and Brain Sciences, will speak on Maximizing and
Measuring Scholarly Impact by Maximizing Scholarly
Access: Toward a University and National Policy
of Self-Archiving Research Output
Tuesday,
October 21, 12:00 - 2:00 pm
Dr. Peter Suber, former Senior Research Professor
of Philosophy, Earlham College, Indiana, and publisher
of the SPARC Open Access newsletter, will speak
on What is Open Access to Science and Scholarship?
Tuesday
November 11, 12:00 - 2:00 pm
Open Access to Scholarly Publishing panel - York
faculty and librarians on will discuss various
approaches to open access publishing. Panel
members are Cynthia Archer and Leila Fernandez,
York University Libraries; Christopher Green,
Psychology; Peter Roosen-Runge, Computer Science;
A Saber Saleuddin, Biology.
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More Information
More detailed information on the Open
Access and Scholarly Publishing miniseries is available
at http://www.yorku.ca/sasit/brownbag/.
More information on Stevan Harnad can
be obtained from his homepage at http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/info/people/harnad.
Peter Suber's homepage with a list of
publications can be accessed at http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/hometoc.htm.
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