I have been involved in publishing on the World-Wide-Web since 1992 and with scholarly publishing since 1995, also as a co-editor of a peer-reviewed journal ITcon and a coordinator of a framework program SciX, that was studying the topic in depth.
The bottom line is that in the scientific publishing process there is a decreasing value added by the publishers. The research is funded by the governments or the industry, performed by the researchers, papers are written and reviewed by them for free, only at the very end a publisher comes along that takes over the copyright, publishes the work and sells the journal at great expense to the community that created and edited the content for free.
the importance of scientific output resulting from publicly funded research being available on the Internet at no cost to the reader under economically viable circumstances, including delayed open access;
Why just no cost to the reader. Why only delayed open access. This section should underline "the importance of scientific output resulting from publicly funded research being available on the Internet at no cost under economically viable circumstances, including open access"....
Rather than making a clear statement that results of EU funded research should be published using open access paradigm, the suggestion to the commission is quite watered down:
experiment with open access to scientific data and publications resulting from projects funded by the EU Research Framework Programmes in order to assess the appropriateness of adopting specific contractual requirements;
Experiment ... in order to assess the appropriateness of adopting specific contractual requirements. Now this is a good example of the Brussels parlance! ...
In all, its good to see the Council take interest in open access publishing. However, one can clearly feel that someone managed to dilute a potentially powerful documents. As it stands it hardly brings anything new. Most of the other actions suggested, such as "debating", "experimenting", "exploring", "bringing together stakeholders" are either long overdue or have been done already.
In the context of the Lisbon strategy that should be driving Europe towards a knowledge based economy, one should note that the explosion of the internet based technologies in the US have been made possible by the (1) open access to software, (2) open standards and (3) freely available scientific articles on the subject. The cited document brings nothing like that to Europe.
Update (11/29/07). Also see the EurActiv article on Turk's assessment of the Council conclusions.
Update (12/6/07). Also see the EDRI-Gram article on Turk's assessment.
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.
