The European Commission has finally put the documents from the Brussels meeting online, or at least it has tried. It lists the URLs on a February 15 press release but forgot to mention which URL belongs to which document. Normally you could click through to find this useful information, but two of the URLs fail, for different reasons. I confirmed the URLs and learned their intended targets from other EC pages, particularly the i2010 Digital Library Initiative and the the Science and Society publication page.
Staff Working Paper to accompany the Communication. NB: This link brings up an error message, The address you used is incorrect or obsolete. (Hello, EC?)
Janez Potočnik's opening address at the Brussels conference, February 15, 2007. Potočnik is the European Commissioner for Science and Research.
I'll blog excerpts from the Communication and Staff Working Paper as soon as I can load them. But I didn't want to wait for that before laying out the titles and links.
In terms of concrete measures, the Commission has already identified the following:
To improve current and future access to scientific information, the EU will support experiments with open access in its recently-launched research programme (by, for example, refunding the project costs of open access publishing).
During 2007-2008 the Commission has also set aside some €50 million to support and help coordinate infrastructures for storing scientific data across Europe and €25 million for research on digital preservation, supporting in particular centres of competence in digital preservation. The eContentplus programme will devote €10 million to improving interoperability of and multilingual access to collections of scientific material (see IP/05/98).
A major European conference on Scientific Publishing in the European Research Area, organised by the Commission will be held in Brussels on 15-16 February with the participation of the Commissioner for science and research Janez Poto?nik and the Commissioner for Information Society and Media Viviane Reding.
With the Communication, the Commission is launching a policy process involving stakeholders and Member States. At the same time is announcing a series of measures at European level to improve the accessibility and preservation of scientific information. The measures are the following:
a) improve access to Community-funded research results, by funding the costs of open access publishing and by providing guidelines on publishing articles in open repositories after an embargo period within specific research programmes.
b) co-funding of research infrastructures (in particular repositories) and projects relevant for access and preservation of scientific information. In total some €85 million have been earmarked to this during 2007-2008.
c) further fact-finding as input for the policy debate.
d) strengthening the policy coordination of Member State actions and the policy debate with stakeholders.
Update. I've finally seen (and blogged) the EC Communication on OA. Thanks to all of you who tried to help me around my access problem.
Update. I've also blogged an excerpt from Janez Potočnik's opening address at the Brussels meeting.
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.
