What is a blog? There are several definitions, but mostly, it's a chronologically ordered journal with links. In this case, we're using a blog to present news about open access and about the Institute. We hope you'll read it, and even take advantage of our Atom feed, to get its news delivered to your desktop. Not up on feeds and RSS? Here's a nice overview.

Directory of Open Access Repositories

The University of Nottingham, UK and University of Lund, Sweden are working on creating an Open Access repository directory.
The project doesn't seem quite live yet, but there's a lot of information at www.opendoar.org/index.html.
According to their FAQ page, the project won't let users search individual articles. Instead, users will use DOAR to find a good place to search for open access materials.

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Open Access Goods and Services?

The Economist has an interesting article on the economics of open access movements.
First, they talk about why open access/open source works:

The characteristics of information — be it software, text or even biotech research — make it an economically obvious thing to share. It is a "non-rival" good: ie, your use of it does not interfere with my use. Better still, there are network effects: ie, the more people who use it, the more useful it is to any individual user.

Then, they talk about the next step in sharing — tangible goods.

One of the most articulate proponents of the open-source approach, Yochai Benkler of Yale Law School, argues in a recent paper that sharing is emerging for certain physical, rivalrous goods and will probably increase due to advances in technology. Where open source was about sharing information by way of the internet, what is happening now, Mr Benkler notes, is the sharing of the tangible tools of technology themselves, like computing power and bandwidth. This is because they are widely distributed among individuals, and sold in such a way that there is inherent (and abundant) unused capacity.

You can read Benkler's paper here: http://www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/114-2/Benkler_FINAL_YLJ114-2.pdf.

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Open-Access and Open-Source Publishing

The ARL Bimonthly Report has interesting overview of Project Euclid, an open-source digital publishing system. According to the article, "Euclid delivers nearly 40 journals to libraries and individuals under subscription, hosting, or open access delivery plans."
The project now has a $670,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation to make improvements to the system.
You can read more about the project here: http://projecteuclid.org/.

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