Contact:
Micah Vandegrift and the Open Access Now Editorial Board
Editors [at] oanow.org
Open Access Now launched today, a resource for news and information about open access and scholarly publishing. The goal of OANow is to provide a centralized, regularly updated, curated news feed, accomplished through active monitoring of scholarly, popular and niche sources. Built on the PressForward platform, which aims to “produce vital, open publications scholarly communities can gather around,” this project sees the current ramping up of open access initiatives around the globe as the opportunity to gather and re-present that knowledge to open access advocates.
With initial support from the Center for History and New Media, Open Access Now borrows the structure of Digital Humanities Now and the recently launched American History Now, utilizing a process of aggregation, curation, discovery and review to showcase the relevant and “need-to-know” items, while encouraging the progress of scholarship on the open web. ”Keeping up with all that’s happening in open access has been difficult,” says Micah Vandegrift, Scholarly Communication Librarian at Florida State University and Editor of Open Access Now. “Our hope is that this site will become a resource that those interested in open access can look in on periodically, or actively follow, and quickly get caught up with the news that matters to their daily work.”
Similar to the foundational work done by researchers like Peter Suber, who curated open access news in a monthly newsletter since 2001, OANow seeks to raise awareness about public policy, resources, journalism and initiatives or programs related to the principle that scholarly literature should be freely available online. The site will function like a journal for previously-published content, combined with the platform and character of a blog. Readers can subscribe to new posts via RSS, follow the publication on Twitter or by email.
The project is staffed by volunteers from COAPI, the Coalition of Open Access Policy Institutions, which shares OANow‘s goal of ”advocating for open access nationally and internationally” and was founded “to share information and experiences and to illuminate opportunities for moving faculty-led open access forward at member institutions.”