Genome Technology Magazine has dedicated in essence an entire issue to Open Access and they have a whole series on interesting things to say about it. In addition they are making the issue available under a Creative Commons License so everyone can check it out. Among the articles are: * Ready or Not, Here Comes Open Access * Open Access: What Does It All Mean? * Many Flavors of Open Access * An Acquisition, an Association, and a Celebration * PubMed Central: The 'Mildly Destabilizing' Compromise * Reluctant Publishers and the Birth of PLoS

Design/methodology/approach – The paper explores some open-access models for academic publishing, the first involving a heterodox economics library portal and the second a more general open peer quality review site. Findings – It identifies a residual role for commercial academic publishers in the new guise of fee-for-service providers of refereeing services, whose accreditations may accelerate the uptake of scholarly contributions. Originality/value – The paper examines the role that academic publishers have historically played and how this is being undermined by the revolution in information and communications technology.

We study how the democratization of the diffusion of research through the Internet could have helped non traditional fields of research. The specific case we approach is Heterodox Economics as its pre-prints are disseminated through NEP, the email alert service of RePEc. Comparing heterodox and mainstream papers, we find that heterodox ones are quite systematically more downloaded, and particularly so when considering downloads per subscriber. We conclude that the Internet definitely helps heterodox research, also because other researcher get exposed to it. But there is still room for more participation by heterodox researchers.

COLLNET 2008 Papers Fourth International Conference on Webometrics, Informetrics, and Scientometrics & Ninth COLLNET Meeting