ISI reports that their popular index to the scholarly literature, Web of Science, covers the contents of 494 peer-reviewed open access journals. That amounts to 4.5% of the roughly 11,000 journals covered by the service, also known by its subsets — Arts & Humanities Citation Index, Science Citation Index, and Social Sciences Citation Index.

Read the full article at:  Almost 500 open access titles indexed in ISI Web of Science

See also:  Transforming Scholarly Communication: A Blog

Drexel University Libraries’ Scholarly Communication Symposium:
For What It’s Worth: The Hidden Costs of Scholarly Communication

Date: April 16, 2009 8:30 am – 1:30 pm
Location: Drexel University, Bossone Lobby

Faculty, university administrators, granting institutions, publishers, governments and librarians are dealing with issues such as open access, intellectual property management, and digital content preservation. Increasing globalization, pressure for public access to federally funded research, and new measures of informative value intensify the mix of issues.

Information is more accessible than ever before. Internet search engines and protocols afford users more communication venues than anyone could have imagined just a few years ago. Open source and service-oriented architecture (SOA), wikis, blogs, and personal networks are examples of the sharing ethos of the web, and are challenging the traditional models of scholarly communication.
Information is not free. There are costs to its creation, distribution and access despite the current movements to make it “free or freely accessible”. What are these costs, hidden and otherwise? Who pays? Who benefits? What are the implications for researchers? What does this mean for publishers? Who the heck is in charge?

These are some of the questions and issues that will be explored at the annual Symposium of Scholarly Communication held at Drexel University on April 16, 2009.
See: Drexel University Libraries’ Scholarly Communication Symposium

To Register: Registration Form

Professional Engineering Publishing has launched new service for conference organizers: Engineering Conferences Online (ECO).  ECO promotes the dissemination of important engineering research that would normally be very difficult, or impossible, to locate. It provides electronic access to the proceedings of conferences in the engineering field.  Papers are generally available free of charge on an open access basis thereby assisting the dissemination of this important research information. All content can be fully referenced using DOIs and the site offers comprehensive search functionality. 

See: Browse all Conferences

Molecular Diversity Preservation International (MDPI) is an organization that provides access to several Open Access Journals.

These are:

Molecules  since 1996. Fully covered by SCI-Expanded.

International Journal of Molecular Sciences since 2000. Fully covered by SCI-Expanded.

Sensors since 2001. Fully covered by SCI-Expanded.

Marine Drugs since 2003. Fully covered by SCI-Expanded.

Entropy since 1999.

International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health  since 2004.

Materials since 2008 (new).

Energies since 2008 (new). Energies, An Open-Access Journal of Related Scientific Research, Technology Development and Studies in Policy and Management, is the most recently launched Journal.

See: New OA journal on energy research and policy launched  article in Knowledgespeak web site.

e-Polymers is a peer-reviewed internet journal under the auspices of the European Polymer Federation (EPF). In the area of polymer science and engineering, it makes novel scientific and technological results available both in academia and industry, and basically free of charge.

e-Polymers is a forum dedicated to the free and fast exchange of information. Therefore, it will comprise original publications on basic polymer science and engineering, reviews on trends in science and technology, in academia and industry, reports on educational topics, information about joint programmes, e.g. of the EU, job advertisements and appointments of new chairs etc., business reports (abstracts), commercial links and advertisements.

Thus, e-Polymers is the answer to the strange situation that many institutions cannot afford to subscribe to journals which – at the same time – they strongly support by submission of high-quality papers, refereeing etc.

Access: e-Polymers

OpenDOAR is an authoritative directory of academic open access repositories. Each OpenDOAR repository has been visited by project staff to check the information that is recorded here. This in-depth approach does not rely on automated analysis and gives a quality-controlled list of repositories.

As well as providing a simple repository list, OpenDOAR lets you search for repositories or search repository contents. Additionally, we provide tools and support to both repository administrators and service providers in sharing best practice and improving the quality of the repository infrastructure. Further explanation of these features is given in a project document Beyond the list.

Browse through Nanotechnology related papers archived: OpenDOAR Nanotechnology

Drexel’ E-Repository and Archives - iDEA is also indexed in the OpenDOAR Directory of Open Access Repositories.

Bentham Publishers are launching more than 200 peer-reviewed open access journals during this year, under the banner of “Bentham OPEN”. The journals will cover all major disciplines and are exclusively open access publications.

See: Journals by Subject

Among Engineering titles, journals include: The Open Aerospace Engineering Journal, The Open Biomedical Engineering Journal, and The Open Chemical Engineering Journal among many other titles.

The Open Nanoscience Journal and The Open Materials Science Journal are also available.

Knowledgespeak reported recently that The Journal of Physics: Conference Series, an open access (OA) journal published by the UK based non-profit scientific publisher Institute of Physics Publishing (IOP), has announced that the proceedings of SciDAC 2006 is now available online in volume 46 of the journal. As an open-access journal, every volume of Journal of Physics: Conference Series is completely free to read online.

iDEA is a centralized virtual space to access unique digital resources produced by the Drexel community. Administered by the Drexel Libraries, iDEA is commited to providing permanent open access to the digital works of Drexel University. A centralized Web portal and storage system for collecting, organizing, indexing, accessing, and preserving–in digital format–the intellectual output of an institution. Institutional repositories provide open and free access to a wide range of digital items, both published and unpublished.

See: Drexel University Archives announces iDEA: Drexel’s institutional repository and DREXEL E-REPOSITORY AND ARCHIVES HELP for more help. See College of Engineering for recent content added in this Repository.

This was announced in EurekAlert’s Technology and Engineering News section (Public Release: 9-Jun-2006). Excerpt: ‘Springer and the Nano Research Society have announced a new partnership to publish Nanoscale Research Letters (NRL), which will be the first nanotechnology journal from a major commercial publisher to publish articles with open access.’ Read the full article at: First nanotechnology journal from a major publisher to offer open access.