Saturday, September 18, 2010
open access in action
As a strong proponent of open access, I'm an avid user of both Selected Works and Scholarly Commons. My Selected Works site is http://works.bepress.com/afilreis/. I've just begun to add old articles and book chapters to the site, but I can say that it's not at all hard: find the offprint or make a photocopy, scan, upload, add the bibliographic information with an easy interface, click. Now anyone can read these heretofore hard-to-find essays, reviews, etc. As I do this work I ponder whether anyone will care, but then I receive monthly stats on how many people have downloaded each article. I'm amazed and gratified by how many. I suspect many if not most are outside the academy, far-flung geographically, or are high-school students without access to a good library.
Labels:
open access