Four major French public research agencies --INRA, CNRS, INRIA, and Inserm-- issued a joint press release today announcing a common policy to launch OA archives to disseminate their research output. All four agencies were among the original signatories of the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge (October 22, 2003). So today's news is not that the agencies endorse OA, but that they are implementing their commitment through OA archives. Under their new, common policy, they will encourage their researchers to deposit their publications as well as their raw data in the new institutional repositories. This step is a direct result of the Berlin3 meeting (Southampton, February 28 - March 1, 2005), though the agencies also cite the Gibson committee report from the UK House of Commons (July 20, 2004) and the NIH public-access policy (February 3, 2005).
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.
