CERN has issued a press release on its OA policy (March 31). Excerpt: 'CERN confirms its commitment to open access to scientific information. At a meeting last Wednesday, the Organization's executive committee endorsed a policy of open access to all the laboratory's results, as expressed in the document Continuing CERN action on Open Access, released by its Scientific Information Policy Board (SIPB) earlier in the month. "This underlines CERN's commitment to sharing the excitement of fundamental research with as wide an audience as possible", said Guido Altarelli, current SIPB chairman. Open Access to scientific knowledge is today the goal of an increasing component of the worldwide scientific community. It is a concept, made possible by new electronic tools, which would bring enormous benefits to all readers by giving them free access to research results. CERN has implicitly supported such moves from its very beginning. Its Convention, adopted in 1953 by 12 European founding Member States, requires openness, stipulating that "...the results of its experimental and theoretical work shall be published or otherwise made generally available". However, it is only in recent years that the technology has been developed that enables this aim to be achieved in practice. It was this ideal of openness and sharing in a large community that led Tim Berners-Lee to invent the World Wide Web at CERN....The above endorsement followed earlier steps that CERN had taken in the past 18 months in the direction of Open Access: approval by the SIPB in November 2003 of the document An electronic publishing policy for CERN; signing of the Berlin Declaration in May 2004 at a meeting in CERN on its implementation (Berlin 2); and the presentation of its proposed plan at a meeting in Southampton in February 2005 (Berlin 3). The Southampton meeting passed a resolution that closely matches the steps advocated by CERN.'...The ever-increasing cost of traditional scientific publishing methods is another incentive towards changing the publishing model. The CERN Library is currently unable to offer complete coverage of even its core subjects. "Authors must continue to have the freedom to publish where they want," said Altarelli, "and currently only rather few journals have adopted Open Access with acceptable business models." The position of CERN as a leading international research laboratory and its advocacy of Open Access could cause this situation to change quickly.'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 4/01/2005 11:19:00 AM.
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.
