[T]o ensure that CSIRO [Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation] "research achieves maximum impact", [we] should note the growing global evidence that maximum impact derives from making research openly accessible.
The Department of Education, Science and Training's accessibility framework, for example, aims to make "it possible for research conducted in Australian higher education providers to be discoverable, accessible and shareable".
These words come from DEST's January 2007 response to the Productivity Commission's draft research report on "Public Support for Science and Innovation". Last week, a petition signed by more than 20,000 researchers, Nobel Prize-winners, librarians and concerned citizens was delivered in Brussels to the European Commissioner for Science and Research supporting policies for free public access to research results.
Such public availability of research includes traditional peer review processes.
Copyright protection of research, as recommended by the DEST-funded OAK Law Project ("Creating a Legal Framework for Copyright Management of Open Access within the Australian Academic and Research Sector"), is more protective of individual and institutional copyright than that allowed by most of the major six-seven multinational commercial science publishers. Publishing by these firms of largely tax payer-funded research have become billion-dollar businesses, which are more focused on increasing profits to shareholders than to the open distribution of knowledge.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 2/19/2007 05:27:00 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.
