We've all seen George Porter's posts on the various listservs (STS-L, ERIL-L, etc...), usually letting us know about another new Open Access journal or set of journals. This is a great service, which I'm sure we all appreciate. But, how does he do it? How does he know all this stuff? Well, he recently posted his secrets to various lists. He has graciously allowed me to reprint his post here:

I've gotten a number of notes asking how I find out about ejournals. There is no single answer to that question. In the case of Amphibian & Reptile Conservation, I received a notification from PMC-News mailing list <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/mailman/listinfo/pmc-news>. On the other hand, I scanned the titles on the PubMed Central site to determine that Clinical
Microbiology Reviews had been completed. I'm sure a notification email will be forthcoming in the next several hours/days.

There are several major repositories which I monitor on a weekly basis:

PubMed Central <http://pubmedcentral.com>
SciELo Wirtualna Biblioteka Nauki - Kolekcja matematyczno-fizyczna [Polish virtual library - collection of mathematics -physics] <http://matwbn.icm.edu.pl/>
EMIS ELibM: Mathematical Journals <http://www.emis.ams.org/journals/>
BioMed Central | for authors | Launched and forthcoming journals <http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/authors/newjournals>

Less frequently, I comb through:

Online-Only Journals Monitored by CAS <http://www.cas.org/EO/ejourn2.html>
Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) <http://www.doaj.org/>
Sciation: HELP/NEWS <http://scitation.aip.org/servlet/HelpSystem?KEY=SCI&TYPE=HELP/NEWS>
IoP News HighWire -- Free Online Full-text Articles
<http://highwire.stanford.edu/lists/freeart.dtl>

HighWire provides several alerting email lists (instructions at bottom of free article webpage), as does, FreeMedicalJournals.com <http://www.FreeMedicalJournals.com>.

Many of the titles highlighted have been documented for years in Caltech's Online Journal Database <http://ojdb.caltech.edu>, through the efforts of all of the Caltech librarians (Dana Roth, Daniel Taylor, Jim O'Donnell, Hema Ramachandran, Caroline Smith, Judy Nollar, John McDonald, Kim Douglas, and Sandy Garstang -- to name a few).

Monitoring a wide range of discussion groups is also a key strategy. While I am personally involved with web4lib, lita-l, sts-l, chminf-l, eldnet-l, slapam-l, eril-l, SPARC Open Access Forum, and quite a few others, other Caltech librarians actively participate in still more groups including liblicense-l, serialst, ....