Peter Suber has published "Recent Watershed Events" in the latest SPARC Open Access Newsletter.
Here's an excerpt:
OA has the momentum of thousands of forward steps every year, in every academic field and every part of the world. But some developments are larger than others, and some are large enough to count as watershed events. I've noticed an upswing in watershed events recently and want to point out half a dozen of them. Pointing them out doesn't amount to a prediction, any more than tremors predict earthquakes. But if you were too preoccupied with local noise to notice these tremors, take a moment to notice them.
(1) The Publishers Association (PA) and Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) announced a meeting to take place in London at the end of this month: "PA-ALPSP Journal Publishers' Forum: Open access: the next ten years" (London, March 31, 2011)
http://www.alpsp.org/ngen_public/article.asp?aid=341706 . . . .(2) The world's largest peer-reviewed journal is now an OA journal, PLoS ONE. . . . .
3) PLoS ONE's success in attracting submissions, revenue, and reputation inspired a raft of imitators from high-quality, high-prestige publishers.
http://blogs.plos.org/plos/files/2011/01/Welcome-Nature2.pdf
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2011/01/plos-one-now-worlds-largest-journal.html. . . .(4) In the same month that the Nature Publishing Group (NPG) launched Scientific Reports, its PLoS ONE rival, it issued an important new statement on OA in general.
http://www.nature.com/press_releases/statement.html . . . .(5) In October 2010, Ten major institutions founded the UK Open Access Implementation Group to "coordinate evidence, policies, systems, advice and guidance, to make open access an easy choice for authors and one that benefits all universities…."
(6) The three largest commercial publishers now publish full OA journals, not just hybrid OA journals.
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