Open Access is an international movement that has the goal of making peer-reviewed published scholarship available free of charge to the public and to the global scholarly community.
For additional reading about open access in general we recommend Wikipedia's well-referenced Open Access article.
Many authors want to make their work as visible as possible by publishing in an Open Access journal, but don't know how to assess the quality of these journals. A new resource, Open Access Journal Quality Indicators, can help by listing positive and negative indicators that authors can use to determine if the Open Access journal in which they want to publish is legitimate.
Dr. John Symons, chair of the Department of Philosophy and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Kansas, has been named as an Associate Editor of Science, Religion & Culture, a peer-reviewed, online Open Access journal. According to the Aims and Scope section of the journal's web site, "Science, Religion and Culture (SRC) is an open access interdisciplinary journal focused on bringing together research and theoretical analysis from the physical, biological, and social sciences with ideas from philosophy, theology, and religious studies. It aims at exploring the unique relationship between science, religion, and culture, and it welcomes submissions from all perspectives and religious traditions."
The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), publishers of the journal Science and related journals, have announced their intent to create a new online-only Open Access journal called Science Advances. According to Marcia McNutt, editor-in-chief of Science, the purpose of the new journal is "to encourage transformative research and attract a wide readership."
The peer-reviewed journal is expected to be available starting in 2015.
Inside Higher Ed and the Washington Post report that Open Access legislation that requires that federally-funded research be made publicly available 12 months after publication has been approved by Congress as part of the Omnibus appropriations bill.
14,557
The number of researchers to date that have signed the pledge not to publish, review, or serve on editorial boards for Elsevier journals
86
The number of scholarly communities in KU ScholarWorks
23,966
The number of times that the most popular KU ScholarWorks item-- Biographical Dictionary of Kansas Artists (active before 1945)--has been downloaded or viewed since 2007
2009
The year that the KU Open Access Policy was approved by the Faculty Senate
3,328,007
The number of times that items in KU ScholarWorks have been downloaded since 2007
4,161,509
The number of searches performed in KU ScholarWorks since 2009
285
(and growing) The number of dissertations and theses in the Pre-1923 Dissertations and Theses collection at http://hdl.handle.net/1808/7158
The KU Faculty Open Access Policy (revised and passed the faculty senate on February 11, 2010) is a mechanism that asserts the rights of KU faculty to provide broad, free access to their journal publications to colleagues around the world.
Under the policy, KU faculty can exercise these rights by retaining enough copyrights and once rights are retained provide KU with the necessary bibliographic information and a copy of the publication. KU then provides efficient and effective access to these publications by means of KU ScholarWorks.
