Many university libraries...find themselves in the situation that they can no longer afford to subscribe to all the journals, in which their staff publish. Unless the university has a subscription to the relevant journal, the ridiculous situation arises where the university does not have a copy of the research paper for its own use....
This ‘subscription crisis’ is one of the drivers for open access, along with the principle that publicly funded research should be available to all. However, another reason for open access is simply that it could increase the availability and citation impact of research – which is surely desirable....
[I]t now seems inconceivable to me that any leading research institution would not wish to retain a digital copy of all the research output of its staff....
[ArXiv] is now widely used by the physics community and the refereed published versions [of its articles] are increasingly playing an archival role for things like tenure decisions – no longer for the real business of research....
There is presently a bill before Congress – the Cornyn- Lieberman bill [FRPAA] – that seeks to make such delayed open access to research publications mandatory for all federally funded research. Similar attempts to make open access mandatory are appearing all around the world, from the USA, to Europe, to Australia....For all of the above reasons I am convinced that some form of mandatory open access to research papers is only a matter of time.
Many academics are unaware that over 90% of journals already allow some form of self-archiving of a digital copy of their paper. In addition, funding agencies and institutions are increasingly requiring researchers not to sign over all their copyright rights to the publishers. The publishers may not like this but in the end they need the researchers to fill their journal pages....
Microsoft intends to work both with forward-looking publishers who are willing to explore and develop new business models that are more synergistic with the research community, and with the academic community in developing a robust system of distributed interoperable repositories....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/25/2007 09:53:00 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.
