The European Commission has published a communication outlining the actions it intends to undertake at European level to help increase and improve access to and dissemination of scientific information.
The intention of the document, the Commission says, is not to mandate open access publishing and digital preservation, but to promote best practices and initiate a policy debate on these matters....
[T]he Commission's paper...makes the case that speeding up the accessibility and dissemination of research results would help accelerate innovation and increase Europe's competitive edge. The paper also argues that the system would help avoid the duplication of research efforts....
Publishers on the other hand are concerned that self-archiving in open repositories may undermine peer review and jeopardise their income....
Although European research budgets have increased, only 1% is devoted to dissemination.
The Commission document aims to address this situation, starting at European level. It says that the Commission will take measures to promote better access to the publications resulting from research funded under the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7). For example, 'project costs related to publishing, including open access publishing, will be eligible for a Community financial contribution,' reads the communication.
Also envisaged is the issuing, within specific programmes such as those programmes managed by the European Research Council (ERC), of specific guidelines on the publication of articles in open repositories after an embargo period. This would be done on a sectoral basis, taking into account the specificity of the different scholarly and scientific disciplines.
'This is the beginning of the process,' said Horst Forster, director of digital content at the European Commission's Directorate General for Information Society and Media....'We [the Commission] will not have a mandate on open access,' he told CORDIS News. Instead the aim is to encourage experiments with new publishing business models that may improve access to and dissemination of scientific information, and to promote best practices, he said....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 2/17/2007 06:03:00 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.
