A refreshing opening and concluding slide at today’s Laureate Lecture: “I SUPPORT OPEN ACCESS.”
Richard Roberts, PhD, Chief Scientific Officer at New England BioLabs and recipient of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physiology/Medicine (discovery of split genes) discussed methods for predicting active restriction enzymes and experimental approaches to testing computational predictions of the same. However, he took considerable time at the beginning to proselytize, as he put it, for scientists to publish in open access journals or to pay the required fee to ensure open access. He is very much in favor of Congress mandating that all NIH-funded investigators to use PubMed Central and gave a plug for Nucleic Acids Research plus his own REBASE database. He strongly believes this is one of the most worthwhile causes in the scientific community, and I - unencumbered by the P&T process, of course (as is Dr. Roberts) - concur.
PS: This practice should spread. Regardless of your field or topic, when you're giving a presentation on your work, stick in a slide saying I support open access. Then say a word or two about how OA helped you in your research and can help others. It's not off-topic for any topic and you don't have to be a Nobel laureate.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/30/2007 10:28:00 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.
