A diverse and growing alliance of organizations representing taxpayers, patients, physicians, researchers, and institutions that support open public access to taxpayer-funded research.
FAQ on Federal Research Public Access Act
BioMed Central
"BioMed Central is an independent publishing house committed to providing immediate open access to peer-reviewed biomedical research.
All original research articles published by BioMed Central are made freely and permanently accessible online immediately upon publication. BioMed Central views open access to research as essential in order to ensure the rapid and efficient communication of research findings.
BioMed Central is committed to maintaining high standards through full and stringent peer review.
All research articles in BioMed Central's journals receive rapid and thorough peer review. The detailed peer-review policy of each journal is the responsibility of the journal editor(s) concerned. Many journals operate traditional anonymous peer review. Others, including the medical BMC-series titles, operate 'open peer review', in which reviewers are asked to sign their reviews. For these titles, the pre-publication history of each paper (including submitted versions, reviewers' reports and authors' responses) is linked to from the published article."
Williams College supports BioMed Central through our membership in the Oberlin Group.
"The Open Content Alliance (OCA) represents the collaborative efforts of a group of cultural, technology, nonprofit, and governmental organizations from around the world that will help build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia content. The OCA was conceived by the Internet Archive and Yahoo! in early 2005 as a way to offer broad, public access to a rich panorama of world culture."
Williams College is a supporter by virtue of our membership in the Boston Library Consortium.
"The scale and complexity of the infrastructure and operation necessary to preserve core electronic scholarly literature exceeds that which can be supported by any individual library or institutional budget. After extensive, iterative discussion in the library and publisher communities, the Portico electronic archiving service has been shaped in response to this need. Initial support for Portico is provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Ithaka, The Library of Congress, and JSTOR."
Portico offers a service which provides a permanent archive of electronic scholarly journals.
Williams College is a founding member of PORTICO and of JSTOR.
"All material published by the Public Library of Science, whether submitted to or created by PLoS, is published under an open access license that allows unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
PLoS is committed to a fair, rigorous editorial process. Scientific quality and importance are the sole considerations in publication decisions. The basis for decisions will be communicated to authors.
As a nonprofit organization, PLoS charges authors a fair price that reflects the actual cost of publication. However, the ability of authors to pay publication charges will never be a consideration in the decision whether to publish."
Williams College supports BioMed Central through our membership in the Oberlin Group.
"SPARC ®, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, is an international alliance of academic and research libraries working to correct imbalances in the scholarly publishing system. Developed by the Association of Research Libraries, SPARC has become a catalyst for change. Its pragmatic focus is to stimulate the emergence of new scholarly communication models that expand the dissemination of scholarly research and reduce financial pressures on libraries. Action by SPARC in collaboration with stakeholders – including authors, publishers, and libraries – builds on the unprecedented opportunities created by the networked digital environment to advance the conduct of scholarship. Leading academic organizations have endorsed SPARC."
Williams College supports SPARC through our membership in the Oberlin Group