Open Access in the United States

A survey of the most important, current open-access projects in the United States

Creating an intellectual commons through open access

Open-access (OA) literature is online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. The low-hanging fruit for OA is literature that authors consent to distribute without payment, or for which they are paid salaries by their employers rather than royalties by their publishers. This relatively small but very important category of literature includes peer-reviewed journal articles and their preprints, the primary literature of science. In this paper I discuss the peculiarities of royalty-free literature, the conditions that lead authors to consent to OA (including authors of loyalty-producing literature), and some obstacles to an OA commons that have the flavor of a tragedy of the commons

A living open book

This is a case study of my short book, Open Access (Suber 2012a). The book is not “enhanced” in the way that a growing number of digital academic books are enhanced. It has no graphics, no multimedia, and no interactivity beyond links, and does not offer different layers or pathways for readers at different levels. From that point of the view the book is conventional and text-oriented. But it has two other enhancements worth highlighting. First, the full text is open access, which benefits authors and readers, and sometimes also publishers. Second, the book has a companion web site of open-access updates and supplements, which benefits all three groups

Where Does the Free Online Scholarship Movement Stand Today?

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Open Access, Impact, and Demand: Why Some Authors Self-Archive Their Articles

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