On March 18, the Open Access Scientific Publishing Committee of the Finnish Ministry of Education issued a 38-page report on open access (in Finnish only). The abstract is available in Finnish, Swedish, and English. From the English abstract:
The committee was appointed to put forward recommendations for the promotion of open access to scientific and scholarly publications in Finland. The recommendations were to be addressed to research funding agencies, organisations conducting research and scientific publishers....The committee's recommendations concern publications of all researchers residing in Finland, comprising those studies that will be published in Finland or abroad for which the authors do not expect payment....The aim of the recommendations is not to change the traditional standards used for evaluating the quality of scholarly publications, but to improve access to and the availability, distribution, visibility, usability and usefulness of the publications....[T]he committee recommends that:
Higher education institutions and research institutes, individually or jointly, set up the necessary open access online archives in which researchers can deposit copies of their publications for free access on the internet;
Researchers are encouraged to deposit copies of their publications in these open access electronic publication archives with a view to rapid accumulation of material in them.
The committee has separate recommendations for funding agencies (pay processing fees at OA journals, encourage grantees to deposit their work in OA repositories), universities (encourage faculty to submit their work to OA journals and deposit it in OA repositories), journals (offer OA to their articles and allow authors to archive postprints in OA repositories), libraries (support distribution of metadata and full-texts of OA research, support the creation of OA repositories throughout the country), and the Ministry of Education (implement these recommendations). (Thanks Kimmo Kuusela.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 3/22/2005 12:50:00 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.
