[Forwarding from Co-Action Publishing. --Peter Suber.]
*Free access to polar research*** Polar Research*, the respected international peer-reviewed journal of the Norwegian Polar Institute, will become an open-access journal starting January 1st 2011. Now readers around the world will have free access to the latest scientific articles on climate, biodiversity, polar history and other diverse topics that are investigated in the polar regions. * Aiming to promote the exchange of scientific knowledge about the Arctic and Antarctic across disciplinary boundaries, *Polar Research* has served an international community of researchers since 1982. As part of the journal’s transition, *Polar Research* is moving to the specialized open-access publisher, Co-Action Publishing.* Polar Research* will continue to be edited by Helle V. Goldman of the Norwegian Polar Institute and an international board of Subject Editors, with support from an international Editorial Advisory Panel. * * * *“This is a bold leap forward for us”, says the journal’s Chief Editor, Helle V. Goldman.* *“As an open-access journal *Polar Research* will be immediately and freely accessible to readers around the globe that are connected to the Internet. This is a very favourable development for contributors and readers alike and I look forward to seeing how the change will help us better serve the polar scientific community. To my knowledge *Polar Research* is the first of the scientific polar journals to go completely open access.” Publishing in *Polar Research *will not entail author fees, and there will be no charges for colour illustrations or multi-media supplemental material. The journal will be published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license, allowing authors to distribute and post the final version of their work for any non-commercial purpose, under the condition that the original source is credited. As such, publishing in *Polar Research* will make it convenient for contributors and their institutions to comply with mandates on open access to publicly funded research. At the same time, authors will benefit from the same rigorous standards of peer review and the same high quality of editorial service for which the journal is known. *Polar Research *will be available in an electronic edition only. This will make the journal much ‘greener’ and is also in keeping with current reading patterns among scientists, who skim article titles and abstracts on the Internet to determine what they need to read. *Polar Research* will continue to publish ‘special issues’, now in the form of thematic clusters. The journal’s archive will be available through the new website as well as through the former publisher’s platform. The new URL for the journal as of January 1st 2011 is www.polarresearch.net. ******** The Norwegian Polar Institute (www.npolar.no) is Norway’s central institution for research, environmental monitoring and mapping of the polar regions. The Institute is the Norwegian authorities’ adviser and supplier of knowledge regarding the Norwegian polar areas, and contributes to the best possible administration of these areas. Co-Action Publishing (www.co-action.net) is an international open-access scholarly publisher, with a growing portfolio of peer-reviewed scholarly journals spanning different scientific disciplines. The company is registered as a limited liability company in Sweden, and is wholly-owned by the three founding partners. *Press Contacts* Gunn Sissel Jaklin Communications Director Norwegian Polar Institute Tel. +47 77 75 06 40 jak...@npolar.no Caroline Sutton Sales & Marketing Director Co-Action Publishing Tel +47 90 69 05 06 caroline.sut...@co-action.net
