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Having ranted a few years ago about the issues around open access to academic research outputs, and the lack of it, I’ve spent quite a bit of time chasing up recent developments in publishing guidelines. As a direct result of research funding organisations insisting on open access to publications that they have funded the situation has improved considerably.
In many cases either authors can publish pre-print versions of their work on institutional repositories like Salford’s one here, in others author’s can self-archive on personal websites only. Unfortunately this sometimes specifically excludes any site that utilises metadata to enable searching of archived material. So you can publish (or at least self-archive) the publication on any site that does not allow it to be searched for amongst other publications. At least this means that I can point researchers who email me for papers at a link which is progress. There is a great guide to what is available here on the SHERPA site.
Anyway, having researched the various policies around publishers that I have submitted work to I have created an archive on a personal web site as permitted and most of these papers are available for free download.
There are still Read the rest of this entry ?
Organising Thoughts 