A £17 million fund has been set up by the UK's Medical Research Council (MRC) for research into biomarkers, the tell-tale body chemicals that are associated with particular diseases....
The MRC have contributed £8 million to the fund, with a further £1 million from the British Heart Foundation and £8 million from a range of pharmaceutical and analytical science companies. Money has been awarded on condition that the results are made freely available in open access scientific journals. The projects will run for three years....
Comments.
Both the Medical Research Council and British Heart Foundation require OA to the research they fund. But their policies require deposit in an OA repository, not publication in an OA journal (see their policies here and here respectively). I suspect that Crow simply mixed these up.
What's new and promising (but not unprecedented) is that "a range of pharmaceutical and analytical science companies" would contribute to a research fund with an OA mandate. Kudos to the leadership in all the contributing companies.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/23/2007 09:44:00 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.
