Life After the NIH
Library Journal
By Andrew Richard Albanese -- 4/15/2005
After a flawed policy, what's next for librarians and open access?

This article discusses the question of open access and various organizations attempts at open access. In particular NIH's access initiative (which is not truly open access) along with SPARC's work in open access and scholarly publishing reform.

One interesting quote from Stevan Harnad (a psychologist and early influential OA activist), "Open access is separate from the serials crisis," Harnad says flatly. "The sooner the serials crisis in libraries is disentangled from open access, he adds, the better for everyone. While it is understandable that librarians' support of open access grows from their own experiences with the market-skyrocketing journal prices, problems with digital copyright and permissions issues, archiving and preservation-these issues," Harnad says, "have now become conflated with open access. "

I have never thought of the open access issue as a separate issue from a serials crisis, but I can see his point.

For more information regarding OA check out,:
Open Access News http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html
BioMed Central's Open Access Now http://www.biomedcentral.com/openaccess/