I stumbled on (because they linked to my post on Nebraska’s Digital Commons) Peter Suber’s Open Access News. With a mission of:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature on the internet. Making it available free of charge and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. Removing the barriers to serious research.
OANews charts the latest development in the rebellion against the Publishing-Company-centric approach to scientific literature. Two example posts. First, “The case for distributed over central OA archiving:”
Most important, institutions, being the primary research providers, have the most direct stake in maximising — and the most direct means of monitoring — the self-archiving of their own research output. Hence institutional self-archiving mandates — reinforced by research funder self-archiving mandates — will see to it that institutional research output is deposited in its natural, optimal locus: each institution’s own IR (twinned and mirrored for redundancy and preservation). CRs (subject-based, multi-subject, national, or any other combination that might be judged useful) can then harvest from the distributed network of IRs.
And from “Self-archiving justified, regardless of effect on subscriptions:
Hence self-archiving is unlikely to cause journal cancellations until the self-archiving of all articles in all journals is reliably at or near 100%. If/when that happens, or is clearly approaching, journals can and will scale down to become peer-review service providers only, recovering their much reduced costs on the OA model that Jan favors. But journals are extremely unlikely to want to do that scaling down and conversion now, when there is no pressure to do it. And there is certainly no reason for researchers to sit waiting meanwhile, as they keep losing access, usage and impact. Mandates will pressure researchers to self-archive, and, eventually, 100% self-archiving might also pressure journals to scale down and convert to the model Jan advocates.
Open Access News seems most interesting for Eide, ZenPundit, and others who find themselves reading articles for fun and profit.
Enjoy!
Update: Related to this, OpenCulture’s listing of free university podcasts. Twelve Byzantine Rulers in particular has been getting rave reviews.