The open access movement is an attempt to free scholarly communication from restrictions on access, control, and cost, and to enable benefits such as data mining and increased citations. While open access is approached here from the problem of subscription inflation, open access is not merely a library issue; it affects the availability of research to current and future students and scholars. This white paper offers an introduction to open access as well as a look at its current development.

the tedious details put together add up to an understanding of how the cell works and how it goes wrong. The details could be put together by a human, going through the thousands of papers on the topic, assembling the facts and finding the trends. Or, more plausibly, given the amount of tedious details out there, they could be assembled by a computer, with a database and a clever algorithm. Except that four in every five of those tedious details, discovered at great expense to taxpayers, will be inaccessible to that clever algorithm. They will be locked away in the basements of university libraries, hidden in human-readable prose that humans will never read. The results of billions of pounds of work searching for an understanding of cancer and a better chance at defeating it will be worthless, because they will never be amongst the parts that add up to the greater whole.

Sciyo Becomes the First Academic Publisher to Introduce Usage-based Author Royalties, press release, December 18, 2009. Authors publishing with Sciyo in 2010 will be the first in academic publishing to receive royalties based on the number of downloads of their publication. For every 10 downloads, 0.2 euro will be accredited to author’s account on an annual basis. Sciyo operates under the open access publishing model, replacing subscription fees with publication fees paid by the authors or their funders. All Sciyo’s publications are available online, free to view, download, print, copy and share under Creative Commons Attribution License and without sign up, which increases their visibility and citation rates. Author royalties will be accredited directly to the author's account, with the exception of royalties under 100 euro, which will be deducted from the author's publishing fee head on the next time he or she decides to publish with Sciyo. ... Sciyo's publishing fee of 470 euro is among the lowest in the open access publishing industry. ...

This RIN report finds that many researchers are encountering difficulties in getting access to the content they need and that this is having a significant impact on their research. Based on the findings of five studies, the report investigates the nature and scale of key restrictions on access to information resources of importance to researchers; the impact of these restrictions and the ways in which they might be alleviated or overcome. The report examines the frequency with which researchers encounter problems in accessing content; researchers’ perceptions of the ease with which they can gain access and the issue of researcher access to information resources in the public and private sector which are not formally published and which are often subject to copyright restrictions. It also reviews academic and research libraries arrangements to provide access to researchers who are not members of their institutions. The report’s key finding is that access is still a major concern for researchers.

misleading title -- actually a review of literature on whether OA articles are cited more than TA ones

A follow up to the 2006 report, 'Scientific publishing in transition: an overview of current developments,' 'The STM Report' collected the available evidence and provides a comprehensive picture of the trends and currents in scholarly communication.

Mark Ware Consulting has been commissioned by Knowledge Exchange (www.knowledge-exchange.info), a partnership of JISC (UK), SURF (Netherlands), DEFF (Denmark) and DfG (Germany), to conduct a study into the feasibility of submission fees in open access journals (i.e. as distinct from publication fees).

This third report in the GISWatch series is entitled “Access to online information and knowledge – advancing human rights and democracy” and reveals how vulnerable the internet as we know it is. The report unpacks the key issues impacting on access to online information and knowledge, including discussions on intellectual property rights, knowledge rights, open standards and access to educational materials and libraries. The report also offers an institutional overview and a reflection on indicators that track access to information and knowledge. 48 country reports –-ten more than last year— analyse the status of access to online information and knowledge in countries as diverse as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Mexico, Switzerland and Kazakhstan, while regional overviews offer a bird’s eye perspective on trends in North America, Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and Europe. For the first time there is an innovate section that visually maps global rights as seen through the lens of Google searches, as well as a visual analysis of Twitter messages sent out during the recent Iranian political crisis.

This report by the British Library and the Research Information Network (RIN) provides a unique insight into how information is used by researchers across life sciences. Undertaken by the University of Edinburgh’s Institute for the Study of Science, Technology and Innovation, and the UK Digital Curation Centre and the University of Edinburgh’s Information Services, the report concludes that ‘one-size-fits-all’ information and data sharing policies are not achieving scientifically productive and cost-efficient information use in life sciences. The report was developed using an innovative approach to capture the day-to-day patterns of information use in seven research teams from a wide range of disciplines, from botany to clinical neuroscience. The study undertaken over 11 months and involving 56 participants found that there is a significant gap between how researchers behave and the policies and strategies of funders and service providers. This suggests that the attempts to implement such strategies have had only a limited impact. Key findings from the report include: * Researchers use informal and trusted sources of advice from colleagues, rather than institutional service teams, to help identify information sources and resources * The use of social networking tools for scientific research purposes is far more limited than expected * Data and information sharing activities are mainly driven by needs and benefits perceived as most important by life scientists rather than ‘top-down’ policies and strategies * There are marked differences in the patterns of information use and exchange between research groups active in different areas of the life sciences, reinforcing the need to avoid standardised policy approaches