ESSAYS ON OPEN ACCESS

The Open Access (OA) Movement seeks to ensure the immediate, free and unrestricted online access to digital scholarly material, notably research articles published in refereed journals. The essays below on Open Access, and the Open Access Movement, were written by journalist Richard Poynder.

These essays are published on the blog Open and Shut? In some cases, the full-text is available as a downloadable PDF file. They have been published under a Creative Commons licence. This licence permits you to copy and distribute the interviews as you wish, so long as you credit Richard Poynder as the author, do not alter or transform the text, and do not use the interviews for any commercial purpose.

The essays:

• Open Access: The War in Europe (March 2007)

• Open Access: Beyond Selfish Interests (November 2006)

• Open Access: Death Knell for Peer Review (October 2006)

• Clear Blue Water: Institutional Repositories (March 2006)

• Not Written in the Stars (December 2005)

• Struggling with Agnosia (November 2005)

• The Role of Digital Rights Management in Open Access (April 2005)

• No Gain Without Pain (Published in Information Today in November 2004)

• Ten Years After (Published in Information Today in October 2004)

More essays will follow. Please note that while these works are made freely available to all, they are written by a freelance journalist who makes his living from writing. To assist him to continue making work available in this way you are invited to make a voluntary contribution. The suggested figure is $8 per essay, but feel free to contribute as you think appropriate. This can be done quite simply by sending a payment via PayPal quoting the email address richard.poynder@btinternet.com. It is not necessary to have a PayPal account to make a payment.

If you point anyone else to the essays please consider directing them to this page, rather than directly to the PDF files themselves. If you would like to republish any of the interviews on a commercial basis, or have any comments on them, please email the author at richard.poynder@journalist.co.uk.

Last updated 5^th April 2007