Friends: Even commercial firms have started supporting open access. Oracle has plans to go the whole hog with Linux and is expected to buy a major Linux company very soon. Now ProQuest is supporting open access to electronic theses and dissertatations. Read Peter Suber's blog entry reproduced below. Best wishes. Arun ---------- ProQuest offers OA option for ETDs ProQuest has launched UMI Open Access Publishing.
From the site:
Open Access is a term used to describe content that a reader can access free of charge. With the new UMI® Open Access publishing service, graduate students can now publish their dissertations and theses with ProQuest on an open access basis. Those graduate student authors that choose to publish their graduate works on an open access basis will be significantly increasing the reach of their research.... The primary benefit of Open Access publishing is that it guarantees the widest possible exposure of your graduate research. It can also help ensure that the officially published version of your dissertation or thesis is the most widely available version in the primary literature.... In addition to the standard features of our Traditional publishing service - rigorous quality assurance, assignment of an ISBN, permanent storage in our microfilm vault, and so on - the Open Access publishing service includes the following: * Free, public access to your graduate work in PQDT Open, our online repository of Open Access graduate works (launching in late fall 2006). * Free access to your graduate work for all institutional subscribers to ProQuest® Dissertations & Theses (PQDT), the database of record for graduate research. * Explicit author permission for the degree-granting institution to make the full text of your graduate work available to the world through their institutional repository. How does Open Access publishing compare with ProQuest's Traditional publishing service? Read more here about the details and see a comparison chart showing the benefits of our Open Access and Traditional Publishing services.... Learn more about how Open Access publishing works in our downloadable Overview, and check out our Open Access Publishing FAQ. Posted by Peter Suber at 10/28/2006 03:46:00 PM. Send instant messages to your online friends http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com