Basic Open Access Web Sites

What is Open Access?
Framing the Issue: Open Access - A basic overview about open access from the Association of Research Libraries.

Informational Web Sites
Guide to the Open Access Movement - A guide to the terminology, acronyms, initiatives, standards, technologies, and players in the open-access movement from Peter Suber.
Institutional Repository Resources - A SPARC informational page with lots of resource links.
Issues in Scholarly Communication - An informational website from Cornell University Libraries.
Lists Related to The Open Access Movement - A wonderful collection of information about open access issues from Peter Suber.
Open Access Forum at the Journal Nature - collection of ongoing discussion about open access from scientists, librarians, publishers and other stakeholders.
Scholarly Communication At Risk - An informational website from Johns Hopkins University.
Scholarly Communication Crisis - An informational website from the University of Connecticut Libraries.
Scholarly Communications at the UW Libraries - An informational website from the University of Washington Libraries.
SPARC Open Access Newsletter and Discussion Forum - A monthly newsletter of the open access movement by Peter Suber and SPARC.

Policies and Proposals
Berlin Declaration on Open Access - A commitment from Germany's principal scientific and scholarly institutions and a growing number of other European counterparts to open access for scientific and scholarly research, from October, 2003.
Bethesda Statement on Open Access Funding - Statements of principle about the steps for all parties involved to take to promote the transition to open access publishing. Includes US and European research, publishing and alternative efforts; April, 2003.
Budapest Open Access Initiative - the defining statement on open access, created at an Open Society Institute meeting in Budapest in December, 2001.
Public Library of Science - a nonprofit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a public resource, founded in 2000.
Washington D.C. Principles For Free Access to Science - A statement by 48 non-profit publishers (including many scientific professional societies) committing to "providing free access and wide dissemination of published research findings." March 16, 2004
Wellcome Trust Position Statement Supporting Open Access - A strong endorsement of open access from a major UK funding agency and the world's largest private funder of medical research, October, 2003.

Open Access Journals
BioMed Central - An independent for-profit publishing house committed to providing immediate free and open access to peer reviewed biomedical research. Currently they have over 100 open access journals.
Directory of Open Access Journals - A directory of free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals in all disciplines. Supported by the Open Society Institute and SPARC - from Lund University (Lund, Sweden.)
Free Medical Journals - Though not strictly open access, this site provides links to accessible portions of well-known clinical and research journals. The site is maintained by Amedeo, a group providing free medical literature and information to health professionals.
House of Commons Science & Technology Committee Inquiry into Scientific Publications - A BioMed Central page about the British government's investigation into scientific journals; information on various aspects of open access are also available at this site.
PLOS Journals - Public Library of Science (PLOS) is a non-profit organization of scientists committed to the open access model of publishing for scientific literature. PLOS Biology started in 2003 and PLOS Medicine in 2004 and additional discipline coverage is expected in the future.
PubMed Central - A digital archive of life sciences journal literature managed by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM). Access to PubMed Central (PMC) is free and unrestricted.

Preprint and Literature Searching
ARC: Cross Archive Searching Service - Arc is a unified search interface providing access to many OAI compliant archives. It is an experimental research service of Digital Library Research group at Old Dominion University.
Department of Energy Preprint Network - The Department of Energy's PrePRINT Network is a searchable gateway to preprint servers that deal with scientific and technical disciplines of concern to DOE. Such disciplines include the great bulk of physics, materials, and chemistry, as well as portions of biology, environmental sciences and nuclear medicine.
E-Prints - Dedicated to the freeing of the refereed research literature online through author/institution self-archiving. Self-archiving software provided for free for individual or institutional use. This site is part of the Open Citation Project.
Institutional Archives Registry - An effort to track the number and size of open-access eprint archives, from Tim Brody at the University of Southampton.
MetaList of Open Access Eprint Archives - A broad overview of the structure, size and progress of full-text open access e-print archives, from Steve Hitchcock of Southampton University.
OAIster - One of the most complete search engines of Open Access literature, from the University of Michigan
Open Citation Project - A NSF - JISC jointly funded project to investigate and improve citation linking and reference analysis for online scholarly literature; the 3year project ended in 2002.

Some Archives and Repositories
By Subject
arXiv - An eprint archive for physics, mathematics, nonlinear sciences and computer science from Cornell University; originally from the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences - An free open archive for papers in biology, neuroscience, computer science, psychology, linguistics, philosophy.
CogPrints - An electronic archive for self-archived papers in any area of psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, and in many areas of computer science philosophy, biology, medicine, and anthropology as well as any other portions of the physical, social and mathematical sciences that are pertinent to the study of cognition. The archive uses freely distributable software and complies with the standards of the Open Archives Initiative.
Computing Research Repository (CoRR) - An open computer science repository, for prerints and papers that are not published elsewhere.
IDEAS - IDEAS (Internet Documents in Economics Access Service) is an archive of working papers, journal articles, and software components in economics.
Preprint and Working Papers Archive - A listing of preprint and e-print archives for astronomy and astrophysics, chemistry, physics, computation and language, economics, nonlinear sciences and mathematics. Maintained by Stanford University.

By Institution
Digital Libraries and Archives Project - A digital library and archive for Virginia Tech, including electronic journals, images, and special collections.
DSpace - Developed by MIT, DSpace is repository software designed to capture the intellectual output of an institution; available for free (currently) download and implementation by any library.
Érudit - A repository of prepublications, review articles, and theses, operated by three Quebec universities
eScholarship - The University of California's repository of institutional publications, including digital journals, books, and working papers, organized by discipline.
NELLCO - A legal scholarship repository from a group of 25 academic institutions in the U.S.

Reading List
"Costs and business models in scientific research publishing" a report (Sept, 2003) and follow-up report (April, 2004) commissioned by the Wellcome Trust
The Promise and Peril of 'Open Access' Chronicle of Higher Education, January 30, 2004
Scholarly Associations and the Economic Viability of Open Access Publishing by John Willinsky, Journal of Digital Information, Volume 4 Issue 2 (April 9, 2003)
Removing Barriers to Research: An Introduction to Open Access for Librarians by Peter Suber, College & Research Libraries News, February 2003
Partnering with Faculty to Enhance Scholarly Communication - Johnson, R. K., D-Lib Magazine, Nov 2002.
Institutional Repositories by Roy Tennant, Library Journal, September 15, 2002
The Case for Institutional Repositories: A SPARC Position Paper - ARL Bimonthly Report 223 (August 2002). A summary of the SPARC white paper.