Since many more eloquent and involved people than I will be talking about open access today, I thought I’d just mention one of my favourite open access journals, Oral Tradition. They’ve been OA since 2007 and have this to say about it:
we aspire to remove many of the natural barriers created by print-based and subscription media. Since we believe that academic contributions should be as democratically available as possible, we are from this point onward offering the journal as a pro bono, gratis contribution to the field. Anyone with a connection to the internet will be able to read and redistribute its contents – not only the current issue, but also the entire 22 years and 10,000 pages of back issues.
This is just the sort of small, specialized journal to which a lot of smaller libraries would have difficulty maintaining a subscription. But that doesn’t mean none of our patrons wouldn’t be interested in it — just that the use statistics wouldn’t be able to support the money spent. In fact, I found out about the journal while helping a student with a research paper last spring and immediately added it to my reading list.
Some other OA journals I keep an eye on: D-Lib, Electronic Green Journal, Fibreculture, Information Research, Journal of Electronic Publishing, Journal of Liberal Religion, Journal of Medical Internet Research, and Kairos.
