Kimmo Kuusela, Finland adopts official open access, CSC News, March 2005, p. 10. Excerpt: '[T]he Ministry of education in Finland put open access on the official agenda last autumn and appointed an authoritative committee to formulate recommendations on open access publishing for all main actors in the Finnish scientific research and publishing community. Like most similar projects elsewhere in the world, these recently released guidelines fall short of actually requiring or mandating anybody to provide open access to scientific and scholarly literature, but they do provide a comprehensive set of principles from which to start implementing the often controversial open access plans....The purpose of the recommendations is not to change the traditional standards used for evaluating the quality of scholarly publications, but to increase the visibility, discoverability, retrievability, usefulness, and impact of the Finnish research output. The two main methods to open access provision are (1) open access journals and (2) open access self-archiving, done by authors themselves....[S]cholars are to be encouraged to self-archive in this way all their [toll-access] articles in these new open access repositories....The working group also recommends that the funding agencies encourage the Finnish scientific journals to increase their open access provision. The committee asks the higher education institutions and research institutes to put all their own serial publications openly available via open access archives, and suggests that scholars should be recommended to publish their articles in open access journals whenever a suitable, high quality open access journal exists in their discipline....The lesson to be learned from the history of the open access movement from recent years is that the existence of even sophisticated technical infrastructure alone is not enough to attract scientists and scholars to offer their work to worldwide free online distribution. The more important prerequisite for the success of open access seems to be that research institutions and research funders should adopt a consistent policy, which states that the entire peer reviewed research output their scientists and scholars generate, should be openly accessible. Hopefully, the open access committee’s recommendations will help to implement such policies.'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 3/29/2005 12:08:00 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.
