Stephen Pincock, UK gov't unsure on open access, The Scientist, February 3, 2005. Excerpt: 'Echoing its earlier response to a parliamentary committee report that advocated state support for the open-access model of disseminating scientific findings, the British government said earlier this week (February 1) it had no intention of requiring researchers to deposit copies of their publications in free-access repositories....Peter Suber, an advocate of open access who is based at Earlham College in Richmond, Ind., told The Scientist the second government response suffered from the same shortcomings as the first one. "It gave primary attention to OA journals, when this was only a secondary issue to the committee report, and it dismissed the primary recommendation of the report, on OA archives, without any attempt to answer the committee's arguments," Suber said. "It's all the more surprising because the committee criticized the government for these shortcomings in November, and the government had little reason to write a new response except to answer this criticism."...In the United Kingdom, attention is now focused on RCUK, which is currently drawing up a common policy on open access....A spokesman for RCUK told The Scientist that the policy decision was moving forward. "RCUK is in the process of getting endorsement of its position from all of the seven Research Councils and the Arts and Humanities Research Board, and this is expected to take at least a number of weeks," he said.'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 2/03/2005 03:41:00 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.
