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What could suit better than opening a blog like this with Open Access itself as the first theme? Being a hot potato the area is not only interesting as a form of publishing, but also as a research area to scholars from for example the LIS-field. However research about Open Access is of general interest to the scholarly community and can today appear in a broad range of disciplines. In the journal Numeracy which is dedicated to the studies of quantitative literacy and education the author Tod Chavez from USF libraries, Florida is raising the question of economic aspects of institutional subscriptions and discussing Open Access publishing as an beneficial option: http://services.bepress.com/numeracy/vol3/iss1/art8/.

Another optimistic attitude towards Open Access can be found in the journal Modeling, Identification and Control which usually publishes articles about mathematic modeling and related areas. In the article Trends in research and publication: Science 2.0 and Open Access the Norwegian authors Morten Breivik, Geir Hovland and Pål Johan Frohm are discussing the possibility of fundamental changes in the scholarly community when free access to research is increasing: http://www.mic-journal.no/ABS/MIC-2009-3-8.asp.

A journal that have published a lot of articles on Open Access is First Monday (a journal initiated already in 1995) which is solely devoted to research about the Internet. If interested in reading about the sociological aspects of Open Access, we can recommend the article Sociological implications of scientific publishing: Open access, science, society, democracy and the digital divide by Ulrich Herb: http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2599

For the reader with skills in Portuguese, the Brazilian journal Liinc em Revista published a whole issue on the theme Open Access in 2008: http://revista.ibict.br/liinc/index.php/liinc/issue/view/34. For the English-speaking reader the issue also contains articles in English. For example Alma Swan is discussing the benefits of Open Access publishing in the Brazilian context: http://revista.ibict.br/liinc/index.php/liinc/article/view/279/166.

The LIS-journal Libreas. Library Ideas dedicated a whole issue to Open Access in 2009: http://libreas.eu/ausgabe14/index.html. Here you can find articles in both German and English on the subject. For example the former MLIS student Elizabeth Mead Cavert Scheibel is in her article Not Your Parents’ History Professors: An Introduction to Three Digital Humanists presenting three scholars from the humanities which have embraced the idea of Open Access, and is also discussing the impact differences of Open Access in different disciplines: http://libreas.eu/ausgabe14/003schei.htm

Do you have any tips of journals with special issues on Open Access or interesting articles on the topic that you want to highlight? Please use the comment field in this blog to share articles, discuss this post or visit our web site to suggest an “unlisted” journal on the theme.