Towards Open Access Scholarship

Open Access, the free availability of scholarly works in digital form, is more and more becoming the standard way in which researchers communicate their findings both to peers and to the general public. Yet the systematic change prompted by the move towards Open Access also means significant challenges for the publishers, librarians and authors, as the established mechanisms of scholarly knowledge transmission are reconfigured.
This volume contains eight papers produced to expand the talks held at the Berlin 6 Open Access Conference that took place in November 2008 in Düsseldorf, Germany. It addresses the needs, views and fundamental aspects that are crucial to the success of Open Access: policy frameworks to enable it (Horst Forster, Deirdre Furlong), economic and organizational structures to make it viable and sustainable (John Houghton; Anne Gentil-Beccot, Salvatore Mele, and Jens Vigen) concrete platforms in different regions (Abel L. Packer et al.) and disciplines (Christiane Fritze, Sünje Dallmeier-Tiessen and Hans Pfeiffenberger) to serve as models, and finally technical standards to support it (Christian Zier). By representing data, models and reallife examples related to the implementation of Open Access this collection of articles demonstrates that OA is not merely progressive in theory, but essential to the dissemination of scientific knowledge in the future.