A group of German universities have launched a web site to advocate the adoption of open access (OA) publishing. Open-access.net is backed by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) and managed by the universities of Bielefeld, Goettingen, Constance and the Free University of Berlin.
By creating the German language platform the group hope to promote OA to scientific and political communities by providing a single source of comprehensive information on OA publishing. The German Research Foundation currently only recommends scientists to provide open access versions of papers that it has funded.
The site will provide users with information on the costs of OA publishing, its legal aspects and the strategies of OA publishing. There are also articles advocating the use of OA. These are targeted not only at scientific researchers, but also institutions, professional associations, libraries and publishing houses.
Funding for the platform will come from the German Rectors' Conference, Volkswagen Foundation and the German Initiative for Networked Information.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/10/2007 09:05:00 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.
