Europe invests many million of euros of European tax-payers’ money in funding research. The purpose is to generate maximal returns for the European tax-payer from the uptake, usage and application of those research findings, in the form of further research progress as well as R&D industrial applications.
This is called “research impact.” ...
In order to be used and applied, research has to be accessible. Research is published in peer-reviewed journals, but journal subscriptions do not maximize research access, because not all researchers’ institutions can afford subscription access to all research journals. Hence research impact is needlessly lost. How much research impact is being lost?
Studies across all fields of research have now demonstrated that if subscription access is supplemented with free online access (Open Access, OA) — by researchers self-archiving their final drafts in their own Institutional Repositories (IRs) — research impact is doubled. That means twice as much research impact for the same level of research funding....
Mandating OA self-archiving for funded research is a natural extension of mandating that the research should be published at all (”publish or perish”). It is also the optimal way to monitor and showcase research output, for institutions and funders, to maintain a record of research assets, and to credit and reward research impact, by harvesting research impact metrics (citations, downloads, etc.) as part of a system of continuous research productivity monitoring and assessment.
And, most important, mandating OA self-archiving will also maximise European research impact, thereby maximising the return on European tax-payers’ investment in research.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/26/2007 09:36:00 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.
