Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Tuesday, January 30, 2007

More on the European petition for OA

Richard Wray, Nobel prize winners join calls to open research to all, The Guardian, January 30, 2007.  Excerpt:

More than 12,000 academics including two Nobel laureates have signed a petition urging the European commission to make publicly funded academic research available for free on the internet.

The online petition, a direct challenge to the lucrative businesses of many scientific publishers, comes ahead of an EC conference next month where "open access" to research will be debated. The conference will be attended by the Brussels information commissioner, Viviane Reding, and commissioner for science and research, Janez Potocnik.

A year ago the EC published an independent report showing the price of scientific journals rose 200-300% beyond inflation between 1975 and 1995. The market, the study said, was worth up to $11bn (£5.6bn) a year.

The report recommended that the European Union should follow the lead of many research funders, both public and charitable, and demand that articles in scholarly journals based on work funded by the EU be available for free viewing on the web shortly after publication.

Since the report was published, traditional journal publishers have been lobbying hard against its recommendations, arguing that they could cause a dramatic drop in subscriptions, especially for subject-specific journals published by learned societies. Many of these societies, which rely on revenues from journals, could collapse, they have argued.

Supporters of open access have compiled a petition calling on the EU to stand by last year's report: "The commission has a unique opportunity to place Europe at the forefront of the dissemination of research outputs and we encourage you to adopt the study's recommendations for the benefit of European research."

Signatories include Nobel laureates for medicine Harold Varmus and Rich Roberts. Institutions to have signed include CERN, Europe's particle physics laboratory in Switzerland, the Wellcome Trust and the UK's Medical Research Council....