Some of the Initiatives in the Scholarly Communication Arena

Open Access
A term used to represent both an idea, that the results of publicly funded research be freely available, and a movement, characterized by various initiatives to make published scholarly literature freely available on the web. Below are some examples of open access initiatives

Tempe Principles
Principles for Emerging Systems of Scholarly Publishing derived from a meeting in Tempe, AZ, March 2000, sponsored by the Association of American Universities, the Association of Research Libraries, and the Merrill Advanced Studies Center of the University of Kansas

Budapest Open Access Initiative
Arose from a small but lively meeting convened in Budapest by the Open Society Institute (OSI) in December 2001

Berlin Declaration
The Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities is the outcome of international conference; the declaration forwards efforts "to promote the Internet as a functional instrument for a global scientific knowledge base" (October 2003)

NIH Policy for Public Access
On January 11, 2008, in response to an act of Congress, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced a revision of its Public Access Policy. Effective April 7, 2008, the agency requires investigators to deposit their articles stemming from NIH funding in the NIH online archive.

ARL's Guide for Research Universities: NIH Public Access Policy

Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA or Cornyn-Leibman Act; Senate Bill 2695)
A bill that, if passed, will require every federal agency with an annual research budget of more than $100 million to implement a public access policy.

Open Archives Initiative
Develops and promotes interoperability standards that aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content. The OAI has its roots in an effort to enhance access to e-print archives as a means of increasing the availability of scholarly communication. Supported by the Digital Library Federation, the Coalition for Networked Information, and the National Science Foundation

Information Access Alliance
The Information Access Alliance believes that a new standard of antitrust review should be adopted by state and federal antitrust enforcement agencies in examining merger transactions in the serials publishing industry.

Discipline Repositories
One response has been for publishers, societies, and scholars to create new mechanisms for distribution of scholarship, within disciplines or disciplinary groups.

Institutional Repositories
Many academic institutions archive their scholarly output. Some include published and unpublished works (grey literature); others include only unpublished. Some include works by students as well as faculty; some only by faculty.

Multidisciplinary Repositories
Commercially available multidisciplinary repositories (as opposed to institutional repositories) provide archived, full-text, digital access to published journal articles in a variety of fields. The purpose of these initiatives is to provide affordable access to scholarly publications while also meeting the needs of publishers. They are frequently collaborative projects between universities and publishers, and their existence as not-for-profit entities helps to mitigate some of the corporate monopolization issues present in the scholarly communication environment. The most highly visible of these initiatives are JSTOR and PROJECT MUSE, both of which began their archiving efforts in the mid-1990s. These content repositories make an important contribution toward creating a sustainable publishing environment.