Open Access Week, Day 1: Timeline of the open access movement

For the whole of Open Access Week, October 19 – 23, 2009, each day's blog will be devoted to ... you've guessed it - open access.

This is Day 1 and this first blog of the week is about the timeline of the open access movement.

Peter Suber used to maintain a Timeline of the Open Access Movement (formerly called the Timeline of the Free Online Scholarship Movement) but since February this year it has moved to be a sub-component of a wiki called the Open Access Directory. Moving it to a wiki is, of course, an excellent idea. It means that the OA community can update, edit and maintain the content, rather than all this falling on one person.

I found the timeline very informative. Although I have been a supporter of the OA movement and an editor/publisher of an OA journal IJEDICT for several years, I hadn't realised that one of the very early OA journals is New Horizons in Adult Education and Human Resource Development which started as an OA journal in 1987. There's lots of other interesting facts included in the comprehensive timeline.

Whilst browsing the timeline, I decided to look at the "containing" wiki - the Open Access Directory (OAD).

The OAD collects together lists of sources and resources about open access (OA) to science and scholarship. It is maintained by the OA community so is continually being added to, edited and refined. The easier they are to maintain and discover, the more effectively they can spread useful, accurate information about OA. By bringing many OA-related lists together in one place, OAD makes it easier for everyone to discover them and use them for reference. Thus, for example, there is one page on "Free and open-source journal management software" - very useful to institutions thinking of starting journals.