With Growth Comes Growing Pains

摘要

Open access (OA) had quite a good year in 2008. The first international Open Access Day was held on Oct. 14, sponsored by Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), Public Library of Science (PLoS), and the Students For Free Culture. The event demonstrated that OA had crossed into every continent and is now a multigenerational process. The National Institutes of Health's mandate is triggering a sharp uptick in submissions, despite continuing objections from the publishing lobby. The number of OAjournals is increasing, both in new and toll access to OA. Institutional repositories are also increasing (625 institutional and 109 cross-institutional, to date). The 41st Harvard OA mandate passed, and other major institutions began to follow (57 institutional and funder mandates have been adopted to date, with 11 more pending). And these are all good things.