User:Harnad/American Scientist Open Access Forum

The American Scientist Open Access Forum is the longest-standing online discussion forum on Open Access. It was created by the American Scientist, which is published by Sigma Xi, in September 1998, before the term "Open Access" (OA) was coined, and it was originally called the "September98-Forum." Its first focus was an article published in American Scientist in which Thomas J Walker of the University of Florida proposed that journals should furnish free online access out of the fees authors pay them to purchase reprints. Stevan Harnad, who had made the Subversive Proposal in 1994, was invited to moderate the forum, which was not expected to last more than a few months. It continued to grow in size and influence across the years and is still the site where most of the main developments in OA are first mooted, including self-archiving, institutional repositories, citation impact, publishing reform, copyright reform, Open access journals, and open access mandates.