The Living Reviews journal family, published by the Max Planck Society in collaboration with partner institutes from other international research organizations, has joined the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA). Since 2008, OASPA supports and represents the interests of Open Access (OA) journal and book publishers globally in all scientific, technical, and scholarly disciplines. It provides a forum for information exchange, promotes standards and innovations in OA publishing, and advocates OA in scientific communication.

Living Reviews journals offer a unique service to various scientific communities since 1998, with some of the first full open access publications in physics, political sciences, and other fields of research. The concept of regularly updated review articles has proven successful, recognized by students, scholars, and not the least by high Journal Impact factors.

For more information on Living Reviews and OASPA see:

http://www.livingreviews.org/
http://oaspa.org/

Contact:
Frank Schulz
Managing Editor
EditorLR[AT]aei.mpg.de

Fachzeitschriften “European Integration online Papers” und “Living Reviews in European Governance” neu an der Uni Wien

Open Access ist wichtiges Instrument in der Wissenschaft

Wien (OTS) – Open Access bedeutet, dass wissenschaftliche Texte kostenfrei und öffentlich im Internet zugänglich sind. Sie können dann unter Angabe des Copyrights frei heruntergeladen, kopiert und weiterverbreitet werden. Auch die Universität Wien fördert Open Access Projekte und der Wissenschaftsfonds (FWF) will künftig in Kooperation mit dem Wissenschaftsministerium sogar eine Anschubfinanzierung zur Etablierung innovativer Open Access Fachzeitschriften leisten.

Das Institut für europäische Integrationsforschung (EIF) engagiert sich schon seit Jahren mit zwei englischsprachigen Journals besonders stark in diesem Bereich, seit kurzem im Rahmen der Universität Wien. Die “European Integration online Papers (EIoP)”, die sogar in den Social Science Citation Index aufgenommen wurden und damit unter den
weltweit anerkanntesten wissenschaftlichen Zeitschriften rangieren, positionieren sich als interdisziplinäres Journal. Die “Living Reviews in European Governance (LREG)” sind ein besonders innovatives Projekt, denn darin diskutieren streng qualitätsgeprüfte Überblicksartikel den State-of-the-art zu einschlägigen Forschungsfragen. Dr. Falk Reckling, Open-Access-Experte des Wissenschaftsfonds, nennt LREG im Bereich Open Access Fachzeitschriften “sehr renommiert”. “Diese Zeitschriften-Kooperation
mit der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft ist ein wichtiges Angebot des EIF im Dienste der weltweiten Scientific Community, besonders für Studierende und Forschende, die sich in einen neuen Expertisebereich einarbeiten wollen”, so Prof. Gerda Falkner, Leiterin des EIF.

European Integration online Papers (EIoP):
http://eiop.or.at/eiop/index.php/eiop

Living Reviews in European Governance (LREG):
http://europeangovernance.livingreviews.org

New stories added to the website www.oastories.org

Open access – the free, immediate, online access to the results of scholarly research – can transform scholarship and its impact. Last year, in Open Access Week 2011, Knowledge Exchange launched a new website to demonstrate this transformation in action, www.oastories.org. The site features compelling open access success stories from across Europe told by a wide variety of stakeholders from individual researchers and journal editors to publishers and companies and cover a multitude of disciplines. All demonstrate the benefits of open access, sometimes in quite unexpected ways.

Those initial stories were just the start of the project and the website is growing to encompass more tales of open access success. The latest batch of stories are now online. They include a young Italian open access cancer journal that has expanded into other forms of media to change the way that cancer research is accessed globally; a Norwegian Polar journal that has successfully moved from a subscription model to open access for competitive advantage; and two longstanding German ‘families’ of journals – Living Reviews and GIGA.

More stories will follow for Open Access Week 2012, which runs from October 22-28.

[source: Knowledge Exchange]

Bernard Schutz, editor in chief of Living Reviews in Relativity and director of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute), took the opportunity and submitted his response to the RFI “Public Access to Peer-Reviewed Scholarly Publications Resulting From Federally Funded Research”.

Read his personal perspective that “combines several points of view: a research performer, an organizer and evaluator of scientific research, and an open-access publisher” at the OSTP’s “Public Comments” page (#276) or directly download the PDF.

Recently, Prof. Schutz gave a related presentation at the APE 2012 conference in Berlin. Watch the video online: “Enabling the Transition of Existing Journals to Open Access”.

The Living Reviews journal project will be present with an information stand at the Berlin Open Access Days on October 9 and 10, 2008.

The Open Access Days (OAD) were launched by the operators of the information platform open-access.net in order to give scientists an opportunity to obtain on-the-spot information about Open Access (OA) and to enhance the activities of the OA community.

Conference and Exhibition Venue: Freie Universitaet Berlin Habelschwerdter Allee 45 D-14195 Berlin