One of the big founding councils in Canada, SSHRC, is looking at an open acces policy and Stephen Downes is asking us to voice our opinions.

If funding agencies start requiring open access, publishers could be in for a big change. They might be powerful compared to the average scientist trying to publish-or-perish, but the little scientist who must offer open access to his publications to keep his grant will suddenly grow some teeth.

Would I risk my federal grant for the whims of a publisher like IEEE? Never.

Once we have open access to most significant publications, the research game may change dramatically. In fields like Computer Science, it would make little difference, but I hear that philosophers are still very old fashioned about their publications.

For researchers who actually want to be read, there are several good eprints servers including arxiv.org (which I don’t use, but many physicists seem to like it) and cogprints (great for AI-related stuff). Of course, you can simply post your papers on your web site and let Google find them (my favorite solution).

On this topic, Suresh cites Cosmic Variance:

Most people these days post to the arxiv before they even send their paper to a journal, and some have stopped submitting to journals altogether. (I wish they all would, it would cut down on that annoying refereeing we all have to do.) And nobody actually reads the journals they serve exclusively as ways to verify that your work has passed peer review.

I think we are slowly getting at the point paper-based publications are going to be completly unecessary. Right now, people still ask me for page numbers when I say I published a given paper. I was even asked for photocopies of the journal issue. These people will soon die and we will be finally free to let the trees in the forest.

It seems like UQAM is about to launch a university-wide ePrint server. They use the EPrints2 software system.

Through Downes’, I got to this list of journals having a RSS feed. This is just amazing! It could be tremendously useful!

It seems like I have been searching for a directory of open access journals for years. Well, I found it at last! There are others, but this one seems to be really good.