Les Carr, The EC Petition and the EC Poll, a message posted to several discussion lists this morning. Stevan Harnad has posted the same text to his blog and added a short preface and some relevant links. From Stevan's version:
Below, Les Carr, head of University of Southampton's Eprints team announces the results of a poll of EC F6 projects on the EC Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate proposal (A1). The results are as overwhelmingly positive as those of the parallel petition.
These results are to be announced in Brussels tomorrow (February 15)....
The European research and academic community has demonstrated overwhelming support for the European Commission's proposed Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate (A1). A petition, launched jointly on January 14th 2007 by research organisations in a number of European countries, has drawn over 20,000 signatures from Europe and worldwide in support of the EC's proposal. The response includes almost 1,000 institutional signatories from National Academies of Sciences, Universities, Rectors' conferences, Learned Societies, national and private research funding councils, and industries that apply research.)
In conjunction with the petition, a separate poll has been conducted of the EC Open Access Mandate's specific target constituency. The administrators of currently active EU FP6 projects were asked to register a vote FOR or AGAINST open access to research results. The result was overwhelming: 85.8% in favour of open access, 14.2% against (based on a healthy 8.22% response rate from 2652 email invitations to vote).
Previous research has demonstrated the increased impact that Open Access to Research Results offers the research industry. The petition and the poll demonstrate that Open Access now receives broad-based and popular support as a mainstream requirement of the European research industry.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 2/14/2007 10:31:00 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.
