The OpenScience Project

Elias Zerhouni covers the NIH Public Access Policy in this article in Science magazine
Find Science Magazine’s article on the NIH Public Access Policy at: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/306/5703/1895

Amanda Schaffer’ Medical Examiner column in Slate magazine on the topic of the public library of science. Highly recommended.
Find Open Access: Should scientific articles be available online and free to the public? at: http://slate.com/id/2111023/

SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, is an alliance of universities, research libraries, and organizations. The coalition was an initiative of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) started in 1997 to be a constructive response to market dysfunctions in the scholarly communication system. These dysfunctions have reduced dissemination of scholarship and crippled libraries. SPARC serves as a catalyst for action, helping to create systems that expand information dissemination and use in a networked digital environment while responding to the needs of academe. Leading academic organizations have endorsed SPARC.
Find SPARC at: http://www.arl.org/sparc/

An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment, for the sake of inquiry and knowledge. The new technology is the internet. The public good they make possible is the world-wide electronic distribution of the peer-reviewed journal literature and completely free and unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds. Removing access barriers to this literature will accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge.
Find Budapest Open Access Initiative at: http://www.soros.org/openaccess/

The Open Archives Initiative develops and promotes interoperability standards that aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content. The Open Archives Initiative has its roots in an effort to enhance access to e-print archives as a means of increasing the availability of scholarly communication. Continued support of this work remains a cornerstone of the Open Archives program. The fundamental technological framework and standards that are developing to support this work are, however, independent of the both the type of content offered and the economic mechanisms surrounding that content, and promise to have much broader relevance in opening up access to a range of digital materials. As a result, the Open Archives Initiative is currently an organization and an effort explicitly in transition, and is committed to exploring and enabling this new and broader range of applications. As we gain greater knowledge of the scope of applicability of the underlying technology and standards being developed, and begin to understand the structure and culture of the various adopter communities, we expect that we will have to make continued evolutionary changes to both the mission and organization of the Open Archives Initiative.
Find Open Archives Initiative at: http://www.openarchives.org/

An attempt by NIH to: 1) Create a stable archive of peer-reviewed research publications to ensure the permanent preservation of these vital research findings, 2) secure for NIH a searchable compendium of peer-reviewed research publications that the agency can use to manage its research portfolio and monitor scientific productivity, and 3) give the public better access to a time-delayed archive of published results of NIH-funded research.
Find NIH Public Access at: http://www.nih.gov/about/publicaccess/index.htm

BioMed Central is an independent publishing house committed to providing immediate free access to peer-reviewed biomedical research All the original research articles in journals published by BioMed Central are immediately and permanently available online without charge or any other barriers to access. This commitment is based on the view that open access to research is central to rapid and efficient progress in science and that subscription-based access to research is hindering rather than helping scientific communication.
Find BioMed Central at: http://www.biomedcentral.com/

The Public Library of Science (PLoS) is a non-profit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world’s scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource.
Find The Public Library of Science at: http://www.publiclibraryofscience.org/