American Scientist Open Access Forum

The American Scientist Open Access Forum, a moderated online discussion list hosted by the American Scientist, was initially called the "September98 Forum" and re-named after the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) coined the term "Open Access" (in 2001). The Forum was initially created by the American Scientist in September 1998 (with Stevan Harnad invited to serve as moderator) to discuss Thomas Walker's 1998 article in American Scientist. In that article, Walker proposed what would eventually become the "hybrid" Open-Access/Toll-Access ("Open Choice") model for journal publishing, offering the author the option of paying the journal to make his article Open Access. The Forum discussed the two roads to what would eventually (in 2001) be dubbed "Open Access" (OA) by the BOAI: (1) the "golden" road of publishing in an OA journal (BOAI-2), which makes its online edition free for all on the web (and in some versions recovers the costs by charging the author-institution for publishing instead of the user-institution for subscribing) and (2) the "green" road of  OA Self-Archiving (BOAI-1), in which authors make their own published articles OA by  depositing them free for all on the web. The Forum (still ongoing) went on to cover (and often lead) in worldwide OA developments in subsequent years. It is now mainly an OA policy forum, focussed on the adoption and implementation of institutional and research-funder [OA mandates].

References:

Harnad, S., Brody, T., Vallieres, F., Carr, L., Hitchcock, S., Gingras, Y, Oppenheim, C., Stamerjohanns, H., & Hilf, E. (2004) The Access/Impact Problem and the Green and Gold Roads to Open Access Serials Review 30 (4) 2004

Walker, T. (1998) Free Internet Access to Traditional Journals American Scientist 86(5) September-October 1998