Open Access: research, communication, knowledge, participation

I've begun drafting part of what will become my methodology chapter, which looks first at my sources and then at my research blog, which, through open access to fieldwork notes, photographic archives, etc., has made my work available to the participant communities and provided me with corrections and information. On the way, however, I'm finding a lot of - very interesting but basically irrelevant - stuff on electronic publishing more generally, which I thought I could collate here, in case others are interested or it becomes more relevant to my own work later.

Part of the reason I took that sidetrack was because I asked myself, as Eugene Garfield (2000) did, "is acknowledged self-archiving prior publication?" I was reassured to see that we had similar opinions: self-archiving is a completely different act to self-publication, complementary to eventual peer-reviewed publication: continual conversations about my work with the professional and public communities I live and work in and with improves that work and, therefore, the eventual publication and, thereby, the benefits to those communities.

There's:

• the Alexandria Archive Institute and its blog, digging digitally;
• Theodore C. Bergstrom's (2001) piece on "free labor for costly journals?";
• the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI);
• Sharmila Pixy Ferris's (2002) observations on how electronic writing is akin to oral communication;
• Matthew G. Kirschenbaum's (1996) paper on the forms and functions of electronic theses and dissertations (ETD);
• Ulises Ali Mejías's blog on information and communication technologies (ICT), networked sociality and knowledge, ideant (and in particular his post on open access easing scholarly communication and work);
• Joseph M. Moxley's (2001) insistence that "universities should require electronic theses and dissertations"; and
• Andrew Odlyzko's (2002) article on the role and value of ease of access and use of research in research; as well as, even more generally,
• the Journal of Electronic Publishing; and
• the Journal of Intercultural and Interdisciplinary Archaeology.

More directly related to my practice, there's:

• arXiv, although it serves the sciences from physics to statistics, not arts, humanities or social sciences;
• cogprints, which does serve archaeology and anthropology where they connect with cognitive sciences;
• eprints, which supports self-archiving and institutional provision of public access;
• Nature's precedings for pre-prints and other pre-publication research; and
• Peter Suber's open access news.

Finding Peter Smith's new blog on publishing archaeology led me to Stevan Harnad's piece on "the self-archiving initiative", as well as Bergstrom's (2001) article on the economics of academic (economics) journals mentioned above.

Simultaneously, through an increasingly diffuse network of searches and links in academic and professional articles and weblogs, I found a range of articles discussing open access or other forms of public access to and participation in academic research.

These include: Steve Lawrence's (2001) article on the correlation between public access and impact; George Siemens' (2007) proposals for a 'democratic, social model of scholarship'; Peter Suber (2007) on the opportunities of open access (OA); Christian R. Weisser and Janice R. Walker (1997) on 'digitizing scholarship'.

Contributions from cultural heritage workers, librarians and archivists include: Laura Cohen's (2007) on that of social scholarship; Eric Kansa's (2007) consideration of the future of digital humanities; and Wessex Archaeology's (2007) commitment to open access for non-commercial use of their photographic archives.