Good Open Access News | Open Science

"Last week brought news of positive and interesting developments in the world of Open Access. Among them, a milestone in the development of DOAJ, an injection of cash for the Knowledge Unlatched project, Mikael Laakso’s new article on Green OA, and the digital collection of the British Library. 1. The Pilot Collection of Knowledge Unlatched, which I wrote about nearly a month ago, recently received financial backing. HEFCE has decided to support KU by contributing £50,000 pounds for the development of the program. With this help, the participation fees for other institutions wishing to join the program will be reduced by almost 50% (provided, of course, they are English institutions). Financial support for KU will no doubt help with the further development of this interesting project. Perhaps now other institutions and organizations will follow the example of HEFCE. 2. Another big step in the development of DOAJ was just announced. The number of OA journals registered in the database has now exceeded 10,000. The journals are from 124 countries and in 51 languages. This is a huge success. When DOAJ started in 2003, only 300 periodicals was registered. Five years later, there were 4,000 journals, and only in the last three months the number of journals increased by another 1,000 to the present 10,000. DOAJ’s repository is growing very quickly, which in turn reflects the pace of dissemination of the open access model in the sciences. 3. A new article by Mikael Laakso with the title 'Green Open Access policies of scholarly journal publishers: a study of what, when, and where self-archiving is allowed' has been published in the open access model. If you are interested in information on policies related to self-archiving, and are considering publishing in this model, it is certainly worth reading this article. 4. This news is not strictly related to publishing in open access, but if you are interested in history, or you are yourself a historian, then check out the popular photo service Flickr. The British Library has added there nearly one million images, which can be used by the public and re-examined:"