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Taylor Matters - Summer 2008

Contents Summer 2008:  What is Open Access? | Requirements of funding agencies | Open Access journals | Open Archives | Author rights | New staff at Taylor Library

What is Open Access?

The term "Open Access" refers to information such as research papers that are made freely available online with the consent of the author. This can be done through publications in open access journals or through deposit in open access repositories. For additional information, see Peter Suber’s Open Access Overview.

Timeline of major Open Access milestones
Open Access events relating particularly to Western Libraries are highlighted in purple.

1971
Project Gutenburg, first and largest collection of free electronic books, launches.
Late 1980s
First online, free journals appear.
1991

Paul Ginsparg launches arXiv.org, a repository of e-prints in physics, math, computer science, quantitative biology, and statistics.

1997
PubMed is launched by the National Library of Medicine; database content can now be searched for free.
1998
Western Libraries becomes a founding member of SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition.
1999
Open Archives Initiative, whose mission is to make material in e-archives and repositories more accessible, is created.
1999
BioMed Central announces free online access to its journals. The first free online article is published in 2000. In 2002, BioMedCentral starts charging processing fees to cover the costs of OA.
2001
Wikipedia is launched – scholars and the general public can create and edit content in this freely available online encyclopedia.
2002
Western Libraries hosts a symposium titled "Electronic Publishing Opportunities: Open the Access to Your Research and Retain Ownership"
2007
Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) was the first Canadian funding agency to develop a Policy on Access to Research.
2008
Western Libraries posts position of Research and Development Librarian (Scholarly Communication) to lead scholarly communication initiatives on campus.

For a much more complete timeline, see Peter Suber’s Open Access Timeline.