The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography, version 42 by Charles W. Bailey, Jr. presents over 1,550 articles, books, and other printed and electronic sources that are useful in understanding scholarly electronic publishing.
SPARC, PubMed Central, and the Public Library of Science are endeavors to create alternatives to the traditional model of academic and scholarly publishing.
SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, is an alliance of universities, research libraries and organizations interested in creating systems that expand information dissemination and use in a networked digital environment while responding to the needs of scholars and academe.
SPARC Focuses on enhancing broad and cost-effective access to peer-reviewed scholarship through: (1) incubation of competitive alternatives to current high-priced commercial journals and digital aggregations; (2) Public Advocacy of fundamental changes in the system and culture of scholarly communication and outreach activities to stakeholder groups; (3) Education campaigns aimed at enhancing awareness of scholarly communication issues.
PubMed Central (PMC) is a digital life sciences journal literature archive managed by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) since February 2000. Publisher participation in PubMed Central is voluntary, although participating journals must meet certain editorial standards. Access to PMC is free and unrestricted.
The Public Library of Science (PloS) is a non-profit organization of scientists committed to making the world’s scientific and medical literature freely accessible to scientists and to the public around the world, for the benefit of scientific progress, education and the public good. PloS is working for the establishment of international online public libraries of science that will archive and distribute the complete contents of published scientific articles, and foster the development of new ways to search, interlink and integrate information.