French Research Institutions, Universities and prestigious Higher Education Establishments have signed a Memorandum of Understanding for the joint development and management of a shared platform for [open access] scientific outputs.
Whereas
During the past few years, networks of disciplinary archives and institutional repositories for scientific findings and scholarly publications have been developing across the globe on an open archive basis ;
ArXiv in the field of physics and PubMed Central in the field of life sciences are two representative examples of disciplinary archives ; also a number of European academic institutional archives (Lund, Southampton, Bielefeld, etc.) are good international examples and worthy of consideration ;
At the institutional level, the Open Access movement is spreading across the continents and research institutions are looking for long-term preservation of their scientific output and for maximum visibility within international communities.
Various French research institutions, such as CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique), INRA (Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique), INRIA (Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique), INSERM (Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale) and IRD (Institut de Recherche pour le Développement), have undertaken to adopt such an institutional approach to archiving after signing the milestone Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities on 22nd October 2003, and have encouraged their researchers to post their scientific findings in open archives ;
French universities support the open access movement and some have developed local archives or are in the process of doing so ;
Access to scientific information is a major factor of development for emerging and developing countries ;
On 5th July 2005, the French Academy of Sciences expressed its support for direct scientific communication ;
The CNRS Center for Direct Scientific Communication (Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe - CCSD) introduced in 2001 the HAL server, a storage and dissemination tool for the self-archiving of scientific findings....
The signatories of this Memorandum of Understanding, CEMAGREF, CIRAD (Centre de coopération internationale en recherche agronomique pour le développement), CNRS, CPU (Conférence des présidents d’université), INRA, INRIA, INSERM, Institut Pasteur, IRD, and CGE (Conférence des Grandes Ecoles), (hereinafter “the Partners”), wish to acquire the necessary means to identify, disseminate, develop, promote and monitor the scientific output of their faculty members and researchers, within their research units and laboratories and, where applicable, of affiliated research teams. In order to maximise the chances of success of the project, the Partners have decided to join forces to acquire a common platform for archiving scientific findings which is interoperable with other open archives that meet the criteria for open access to scientific findings. The platform will allow researchers to communicate their findings directly to the international community via open archives ; it will enable research institutions (universities, public scientific and technical institutions (EPSTs)) and specialized higher education establishments (Grandes Ecoles) to collect, publish, develop, promote and preserve their scientific findings, therefore improving the visibility of French research in general within the international scientific community....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 3/16/2007 09:59:00 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.
During the past few years, networks of disciplinary archives and institutional repositories for scientific findings and scholarly publications have been developing across the globe on an open archive basis ; 
