Robert Kiley [is the] head of e-strategy at the Wellcome Library....The purpose of the Wellcome Library, which is entirely funded by the Wellcome Trust, is to underpin research, learning and understanding of medicine’s enduring impact on society by developing, preserving and providing free public access to its collections....
The trust is carrying out a major project to digitise its historic collection of medical journals. The project began in 2004 and will create a digital archive providing free access to medical journals via PubMed Central, the online medical service from the US National Institutes of Health, with which the Wellcome Library has a close association. The earliest archived journal in the digitisation project dates from 1809 and the archive will also include current and future journals, which has meant getting agreement from a wide range of publishers....
The library has digitised all 200,000 images in its collection, making them fully accessible via its website, and is now starting to think about what should be its next major digitisation project....
Collaborative working is an important aspect of the library. Backfile digitisation is part-funded by the US National Library of Medicine (NLM) and the UK Joint Information Systems committee (JISC)....
Negotiating with publishers over the rights involved in the backfile digitisation project has not always been easy. The arrangement is that the library digitises its existing journals, making them freely available and giving the publisher a copy; in return for that, the publishers have to deposit all present and future articles, although they have some ability to embargo specific material for six months. Not all publishers are happy with this, acknowledges Kiley, but the clear objective of the Wellcome Library is open access, he points out....
The open access principle applies not only to the journals held by the library, but also to the extensive research work funded by the Wellcome Trust, which provides £450m a year in UK research funding and is responsible for publishing about 4,000 papers a year....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 3/06/2007 11:43:00 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.
