Education & Open Access - post ERIC changes

The effect of the recent changes in ERIC is discussed by the AERA Communication of Research SIG, which maintains a list of open access journals in education. DOAJ also includes journals in other disciplines as well as education.

Will an independent "disciplinary repository" develop in education (as is Cogprints for psychology, or MERLOT for learning objects)?

Will education faculty become regular contributors to institutional repositories that may be searched by OAI harvesters? See the University of Kansas ScholarWorks which was built on open-source software (DSpace) created at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

NEW ebooks online - GOOGLE beta test program

Oct 5. Google launched Google Print (beta) and on this page offers an invitation to publishers to let people find their books by searching the full text on the internet. Once found a surfer can browse the book but not print/download and there are convenient links to buy the book. An online Tattered Cover. There are not many books there yet (40,000+ listed, but only a very few actually link to anything yet). To look at the list in (of course) no particular order do a google search on: isbn site:print.google.com.

SELL statement on Elsevier's new pricing model

Will business practices such as these ultimately be self defeating?
Read the statement (posted in September2004) from the Southern European Libraries Link page at http://www.heal-link.gr/sell/statement.htm.

Scholars are adopting open-access practices & being rewarded

Antelman, K. (2004) . Do Open-Access Articles Have a Greater Research Impact? Author eprint, E-LIS, 29 September 2004, abstract available at College and Research Libraries, 65(5):372-382, September 2004.

From the abstract:

This study looks at articles in four disciplines at varying stages of adoption of open access—philosophy, political science, electrical and electronic engineering and mathematics—to see whether they have a greater impact as measured by citations in the ISI Web of Science database when their authors make them freely available on the Internet. The finding is that, across all four disciplines, freely available articles do have a greater research impact.

Paper added 29 September 2004 to the OpCit Projects' bibliography of studies on the effect of open access and downloads on citation impact.

Open Access in Anthropology

"The Anthropology Review Database (ARD) is intended to improve the level of access of anthropologists to anthropological literature by making them more aware of what is being published and helping them to evaluate its relevance to their own interests. Unlike the more traditional print journals, ARD is not constrained by production deadlines and has few running costs. We can keep abreast of the production of new materials, and do so in a much more timely fashion than the traditional media. Envision an almost continous flow of information from publisher to reader, by way of this database."

In March, 2004, ARD signed on to the Washington DC Principles for Free Access to Science, an initiative with a "commitment to providing free access and wide dissemination of published research findings".

Look at the list of books to review, and sign up for those you would like to review. ARD retains copyright to all submitted reviews (disclaimer).