January Charleston Advisor devoted to OA

George S. Machovec, Open Access and Scholarly Publishing, Charleston Advisor, January 2004. Introduction to a special issue devoted to open access. Excerpt: "This issue of The Charleston Advisor has a special focus on open access and the scholarly publishing crisis. Libraries are canceling journals at an ever-increasing pace due to declining or static materials budgets and the high price of journals. The scholarly community has acknowledged this dilemma for some time and many new initiatives have arisen to provide alternate publishing models. Initiatives such as local institutional repositories, SPARC (Scholarly Publsing and Academic Resources Coalition), BioMed Centgral, PubMed Central, PloS (The Public Library of Science), BioOne and others have each approached the problem in unique ways. Some initiatives provide low-cost publishing venues for existing societies, others have launched new journals to challenge high-priced commercial counterparts and some use new funding models to pay for their efforts."