Lila Guterman, NIH's Final Plan for Free Access to Journal Articles Draws Fire From 2 Directions, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 4, 2005 (accessible only to subscribers). Excerpt: 'Elias A. Zerhouni, the NIH's director, called the policy a compromise between advocates for immediate public access and organizations, particularly publishers and scholarly societies, that have spoken out against the NIH's involvement in the issue....The final policy may end up pleasing neither side of the debate. "I regret that the National Institutes of Health has scaled back its open-access policy," Peter Suber, director of the Open Access Project at Public Knowledge, a nonprofit group that advocates the free flow of information, said in a written statement. The policy, he said, "could significantly delay public access to publicly funded medical research. It could even mean that the public will never have access to some of it at all." A group of nonprofit publishers took issue with the NIH's rule for the opposite reason. They called it unnecessary and wasteful, given that many nonprofit publishers already maintain databases and make their contents free within 12 months.'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 2/04/2005 04:30:00 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.
