Association of American University Presses paper on Open Access and and its challenges, particularly with regard to transition from the "market economy" currently demanded of UP's parent institutions to the "gift economy".
"In the age of the Internet, the ways you share and use academic research results are changing — rapidly, fundamentally, irreversibly. There’s great potential in change. After all, faster and wider sharing of journal articles, research data, simulations, syntheses, analyses, and other findings fuels the advance of knowledge. It’s a two-way street — sharing research benefits you and others. But will the promise of digital scholarship be fully realized? How will yesterday’s norms adapt to tomorrow’s possibilities?
This website will help you understand the changing landscape and how it affects you and your research. It also offers practical ways to look out for your own interests as a researcher."
"Creative Commons is a new system, built within current copyright law, that allows you to share your creations with others and use music, movies, images, and text online that's been marked with a Creative Commons license."
Directory of Open Access Journals
"This service covers free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals. We aim to cover all subjects and languages. There are now 2622 journals in the directory. Currently 790 journals are searchable at article level. As of today 130415 articles are included in the DOAJ service."
LOCKSS (for "Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe") is open source software that provides librarians with an easy and inexpensive way to collect, store, preserve, and provide access to their own, local copy of authorized content they purchase. Running on standard desktop hardware and requiring almost no technical administration, LOCKSS converts a personal computer into a digital preservation appliance, creating low-cost, persistent, accessible copies of e-journal content as it is published. Since pages in these appliances are never flushed, the local community's access to that content is safeguarded. Accuracy and completeness of LOCKSS appliances is assured through a robust and secure, peer-to-peer polling and reputation system.
"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.
SHERPA: Securing a Hybrid Environment for Research Preservation and Access. "SHERPA is investigating issues in the future of scholarly communication. It is developing open-access institutional repositories in a number of research universities to facilitate the rapid and efficient worldwide dissemination of research".
Part of this site is the searchable SHERPA / Romeo database that can be used to find a summary of permissions that are normally given as part of each publisher's copyright transfer agreement.
Q & As on a wide range of copyright issues; includes the Author's Addendum.
Transforming Scholarly Communication and Libraries (Cornell University)
Cornell's website offers a very focused overview of all issues pertaining to copyright management, serials pricing, affordable publishing, especially (arXive) , and open access.