Open access directory

As I've written before, I think open access is an undeniable public good. It's something every scholar and scholarly society should strive to support. But I am not yet convinced we've found a model for open access that will work for journals associated with small-medium professional societies (like those in BioOne¹, for example). Making published articles available to users free of charge doesn't eliminate the expenses associated with copyediting, markup², and hosting. Visitors to national parks pay a user fee, so it doesn't seem entirely unreasonable to expect journal users to pay a small fee to read articles they're interested in.

That's a long-winded disclaimer to a short notice about a new resource: the Open Access Directory.

Welcome to the Open Access Directory (OAD), a compendium of simple factual lists about open access (OA) to science and scholarship, maintained by the OA community at large. By bringing many OA-related lists together in one place, OAD will make it easier for users, especially newcomers, to discover them and use them for reference. The easier they are to maintain and discover, the more effectively they can spread useful, accurate information about OA.

The goal is for the OA community itself to enlarge and correct the lists with little intervention from the editors or editorial board. For quality control, we limit editing privileges to registered users. We welcome your contributions to our lists, ideas for new lists, and comments to help us improve OAD. Please contact us or use the discussion tab. We expect a lot of traffic during our launch phase and please understand if we cannot get to all of the messages right away.

Thank you for visiting during our launch,

Peter Suber (co-founder), Robin Peek (co-founder), Terry Plum,AO Athanasia Pontika, Charles Bailey, Leslie Chan, Melissa Hagemann, Heather Joseph, Alma Swan, John Wilbanks

The editors and editorial board members of the OAD

Keep an eye on the OAD. Open access to scholarly materials is a goal we should all strive for, even if we never get there.