David Malakoff and Daniel Bachtold, Who Owns, Who Pays? U.K., U.S. Offer Answers for Journals, Science, July 4, 2003. A short overview of the JISC-BMC deal and the Sabo bill. Unfortunately, not even an abstract is free online. Excerpt: "Government officials on both sides of the Atlantic are stoking the debate over free access to electronic scientific journals. In the United Kingdom, a government body announced last month that it will pay the publication costs of any British university researcher who submits a paper to open-access journals published by BioMed Central, a London-based company. And last week a member of the U.S. Congress introduced a bill aimed at preventing private publishers from monopolizing information by denying copyright protection to work produced with "substantial" government funding. Some open-access advocates welcome both moves as a means to improve the flow of scholarly information. But others doubt that the U.S. copyright proposal would enhance access--adding that it could harm researchers' ability to control use of their own work and profit from inventions."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 7/15/2003 02:50:00 PM.
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.
