Open Access, Scholarly Publishing, and Author Rights & Responsibilities   Tags: author_rights, open_access, scholarly_communication, scholarly_publishing  

LTS provides financial support to these Open Access groups, projects and publishers:

BioMed Central

SPARC

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

PLoS

Open Content Alliance (via the Boston Library Consortium)

The Berlin Declaration of Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and the Humanities grew out of a conference held at the Max Planck Society, Berlin, Germany, October 2003.

  by Peter Suber

Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most  copyright and licensing restrictions. What makes it possible is the internet and the consent of the author or copyright-holder.

OA is entirely compatible with peer review, and all the major OA initiatives for scientific and scholarly literature insist on its importance. Just as authors of journal articles donate their labor, so do most journal editors and referees participating in peer review.

OA literature is not free to produce, even if it is less expensive to produce than conventionally published literature. The question is not whether scholarly literature can be made costless, but whether there are better ways to pay the bills than by charging readers and creating access barriers. Business models for paying the bills depend on how OA is delivered.