FirstMonday.org has long been one of the most interesting and informative sites on the web – to quote the site, First Monday is one of the first openly accessible, peer–reviewed journals on the Internet, solely devoted to the Internet. Since it first started in May 1996, it has been a remarkably successful and fertile source of insights into how the world has been changing, with contributors over the years ranging from John Seely Brown to Linus Torvalds himself.

We’ve highlighted some of the FirstMonday articles on here in the past, but I felt their October issue deserved special attention for a couple of reasons. For one, this month marks the transition of First Monday over to the Open Journal System, including the current issue and all archived content (noting, of course, that this also means the home page has changed). Second, and more importantly, the special October issue might be of particular interest to many, as it is full of selected papers from a recent conference at Simon Fraser University to discuss open access and scholarly publishing.

While I can’t go into all 18 articles here, a small sampling of the titles (the link will take you to the abstract of each) will give you a taste of some of the fascinating research available:

Scholarly publishing in sub-Saharan Africa in the twenty-first century: Challenges and opportunities – Ezra Ondari-Okemwa

Scholarly publishing initiatives at the International Rice Research Institute: Linking users to public goods via open access – Albert Borrero, Mila Ramos, Anna Arsenal, Katherine Lopez, Gene Hettel

The impact of the open access movement on medical based scholarly publishing in Nigeria – Alasia Datonye Dennis

A critical theory of open access: Libraries and electronic publishing – Ajit Pyati

It’s some fascinating stuff – but if this particular topic is not your cup of tea, I encourage you to take a tour through the archives and see what else they’ve been publishing over the last decade. If you’re interested in wikinomics, I guarantee that you’ll find something that interests you somewhere on FirstMonday.