JISC has bought institutional memberships in BioMed Central (BMC) for all 180 universities in the UK. The result is a major advance for open access to British biomedical research, and a major endorsement for the BMC business model.
Quoting Donald McLeod's story in today's Guardian: "In a landmark deal more than 80,000 biology and medicine researchers working at UK universities can now share their research findings freely with fellow researchers, postgraduates, students and the general public worldwide. The scheme covers 180 universities and colleges and researchers in the NHS in England. Research would be made available in freely accessible online journals, a committee of the funding councils announced today in a move which it is hoped will begin to make an impact on the staggering £76m a year that universities spend on learned journals....So the £80,000 deal by Jisc, a joint committee of the Higher Education Funding Council for England and other UK further and higher education funding bodies, with online publisher BioMed Central, is part of a wider movement by universities here and in the US to make scientific research freely available on the internet....This is the first step of many that funding bodies are taking to ensure the success of open access. For the academic and clinical research communities working in UK higher education institutions, one of the biggest hurdles to publishing in open access journals - cost - has been removed. Funding bodies are now moving to acknowledge that authors who publish in these journals are providing a service to the scientific community."
Quoting Scott Gibbens, Project Manager of the NHS Core Content Group, in the BMC press release: "This deal is really exciting for us as it gives us an opportunity to be leaders in free access electronic publishing. If someone from the NHS writes an article and publishes it in, say, The New England Journal of Medicine, our researchers then have to pay to access that article. The NHS will potentially pay many times to access research that it has funded and produced. We want our research to be freely available, to our researchers, and to everyone else."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/17/2003 09:07:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
