The world of scientific publishing has been buzzing in the past few months, with many leading publishers working on new initiatives. Some have been exploring alternatives to traditional publishing processes, others rethinking standard business models. This surge in inventiveness has been fuelled by widespread and growing discontent with the limitations of conventional journal publishing.
The Research Works Act, which made the rounds of the US Congress earlier this year, brought the question of access to the fore and motivated scientists to become activist in their support for open-access publishing. Many universities (for example Harvard University and the University of California, San Francisco) have strongly urged their researchers towards open access, and, in the first nationwide push in the same direction, the British Government announced a couple of weeks ago that all publicly funded research will be published open access by 2014.
There has been a rising tide of blog posts, ...
