The EU's eContentPlus program has issued its 2007 Work Programme. It endorses OA and calls for funding proposals in areas that include OA. (Thanks to Francis Muguet and his page for WSIS-SI on the EU and OA.)
To signal the importance of and launch a policy process on access to and dissemination of scientific/scholarly information and strategies for the preservation of such information across the Union, the Commission further issued a communication on scientific information to the European Parliament, the Council and the European Economic and Social Committee....The eContentplus programme will support the creation of the European Digital Library by achieving interoperability between national digital collections and services (e.g. through common standards) and ensuring that these will be accessible through the multilingual European Digital Library service as being developed by TEL. It further aims to improve the spread of European research results through experiments with open access.
For these purposes, best practice networks for digital libraries as well as targeted projects for digital libraries and for scientific/scholarly content will be funded in 2007.
In Section 5.3, it describes some specific funding goals:
5.3. Targeted projects for scientific/scholarly content
Objective:
Improve the spread of European research results through conclusive experiments with open access to digital libraries of scientific/scholarly content. The latter refers to organised collections of published results of scientists' or scholars' research work in the EU Member States or other countries participating in the programme and includes both articles, papers, conference proceedings, monographs, textbooks and other similar publications and the related underlying datasets.
Conditions:
In addition to the common requirements for Targeted Projects, proposals should meet the following conditions:
Carry out conclusive experiments on new models and processes involving different types of relevant stakeholders, i.e. academic community, libraries, institutional repositories, scientific publishers and the funding bodies.
The needs of the users (i.e. researchers) should be taken into account, ensuring the right balance between the desirable dissemination of research results and the equally necessary protection of IPR.
Note that these are only part of the Work Programme's Planned call for proposals 2007. The final version will be published in June. But if you're planning to apply for funds, it wouldn't hurt to start drafting a proposal now.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/18/2007 05:06:00 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.
