Focus AreasMelissa Hagemann
Program Manager, Information Program, Open Society Institute
Tel: + 1-212- 548-0142
E-mail: mhagemann@sorosny.org
The Open Access Project builds upon the principles outlined in the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) and aims to assist the international effort to make research articles in all academic fields freely available online. The Open Access Project:
- Supports authors and institutions from the OSI region to publish articles in open access journals
- Supports the development of business guides for open access journals
- Spreads awareness of the benefits of open access by hosting meetings of publishers, Academies of Sciences, libraries, and funding agencies
- Supports the development of tools to assist in the adoption of open access
The project has supported authors from the OSI region to publish articles in 40 open access journals through a pilot support scheme. In addition, working with the open access publisher, BioMed Central, the project supports institutional memberships to BioMed Central for institutions in the OSI region.
To assist in the transition from traditional subscription-based journals to open access journals, the project supported the development of business guides for open access journals.
One of the primary goals of the Open Access Project is to spread awareness of the benefits of open access to the scholarly community. OSI convened a meeting of the Academies of Sciences from the former Soviet Union, Central and Eastern Europe, and China in January 2003. The meeting introduced the Academies to open access journals and institutional repositories. Exploring the benefits of open access for publishers is a high priority for the project, thus OSI was pleased to support a workshop to discuss the open-access-journal business models with the UK-based Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers. In addition, OSI supports speakers and selected participants to attend various international conferences, including the 2nd Workshop on the Open Archives Initiative, held at CERN, and the First Nordic Conference on Scholarly Communications.
The project is funding several tools to assist in the adoption of open access. The Lund University Library is developing a directory of open access journals which will provide greater visibility for these journals. In addition, the Academic Contributor Information System will create a relational dataset between authors and their publications and institutions. This information will assist in building awareness of the benefits of institutional repositories. OSI is also supporting the development of a user’s manual for EPints.org, an Open Archives Initiative compliant software.
To read the text of the initiative, and for additional details regarding the grants mentioned above, please visit the BOAI website, available in English, Russian, German, and French:
http://www.soros.org/openaccess/index.shtml
