A 43 YEARS HISTORY, PASSING FROM THE GUTENBERG PROJECT INITIATIVE TO THE OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES MOVEMENT .
Authors: Jalobeanu Mihai stanislav 
Published: February 2023

When Michael Hart initiated his ambitious Gutenberg project of computer re-writing essential literature books, in 1971, sure it was very difficult to imagine our today dependency of digital devices and social media. To type on the those time typewriter devices the basic scholarly novels it was a difficult option for a 24 years man, proven a visionary thinking to the people future access. It was ten years before the lunching the IBM PC's, and Internet Protocols, in a time of the firsts text editors... Twenty years before the first World Wide Web real demo ... But Michael Hart succeeded to build a community of volunteers, delivering free the project results, digital books (through floppies, diskettes, tapes, and later on CD-ROM, or DVDs. Gutenberg project arrived as a model for many libraries to save their depots and manuscripts.
Networking and Internet services (email and FTP) already gave new solutions for distribution and visibility of Gutenberg project, for access to digital books.
For scientists it was another need, the better access to the scientific publications, an easier way to publish their results. Consequently, quite in the same time when CERN accepted to finance the Tim Berners Lee proposal, the firsts signs of a movement for open access publications are registered. As a nice example, PACS Review (Public Access Computer Science Review), at the Houston University, prepared and announced in 1989, with its first 3 numbers in 1990. A journal delivered as ASCII file, by email, later through a Gopher server, and finally-from 1995 on-line, through the Houston University Web server (HTML, or ASCII format). PACS Review publication stops in 2000.
Since 1995 a really peer revue, quality, open journal was launched by Cristian Calude, Herman Maurer, Arto Salomaa at Graz University, called JUCS - ,,Journal of Universal Computer Science". A journal with very regular publication till now.
There are, of course, a lot of other interesting examples of electronic (digital) open access journals, in different fields.
A new step in this evolution was done through the development of the open source tools for the management of such digital journals into the Web server infrastructure. It was done by the initiative and efforts of John Willinsky, through his PKP - Public Knowledge Project - a multi-university initiative developing free open source software and conducting research to improve the quality and reach of scholarly publishing. PKP was founded in 1998 at the Education Faculty of UBC, with the aim to improve the research quality.
Another important steps necessary to count of are the 2002 Budapest Open Access Initiative, and the MIT university decision to publish their course materials, generating the corresponding consortium.
As an answer to Budapest Open Access Initiative, it is the developing of an on-line catalog of Open Access Journals - DOAJ (build and maintained by Lars Bjornshauge from 2003 until 2013 at the Lund University, recently moved at Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association - OASPA. Into this catalog there are included now about 10.000 Open Access Journals.
Of course that in such a paper it isn't possible to escape the competition, more a less a battle between Online Open-Access journals and traditional ones. As well to discus the issue of fake publishers or publishers not living up to reasonable standards both in terms of content and of business behavior.
Does all this Open Access movement change a bit the perspectives concerning the transformation of the teachers role in the "Web 2.0 Era" ?