To mark Open Access Week in 2010, OASPA is launching a series of presentations about open-access projects and journals – the OASPA Showcase. These will be freely available and will form a valuable resource for teaching and learning about successes in open-access publishing. We are particularly interested to focus on projects that might not be so well known outside of their immediate communities, and where the experience might be broadly relevant for open-access publishing. We would be delighted to receive suggestions for future presentations.
One of the key membership groups within OASPA is the scholar publisher group. There are thousands of such publishers in the academy, and many of these journals have become important publication venues although they are not published by a conventional publishing organization. Many such journals also rely on freely available open-source software such as Open Journal Systems produced by the Public Knowledge Project.
Our first OASPA Showcase features the Journal of Medical Internet Research, which has been published for more than 10 years, under the editorial leadership of Gunther Eysenbach, also one of the founders of OASPA. Gunther provides a thorough history of his journal, including information about the aims and mission of the journal, the operational infrastructure, and various editorial innovations and experimentation. There is much in this presentation that will be of interest to open-access publishers everywhere.
We look forward to future OASPA Showcases and wellcome your suggestions. A number of presentations are now lined up and we will announce them as they become available through this blog and other channels.
On behalf of OASPA,
Mark Patterson & Caroline Sutton
This is such an important cause! The fact is, scholarly information has been traditionally kept at-bay from the general public. Through sophisticated hierarchical systems like member-only access to academic journals or overly academic/scientific language that makes the content inaccessible, the “us-them” duality is perpetuated and keeps important information from the masses. Thank you for making your information public, I have already benefited from many of your articles as I do research for my Master’s thesis.