...Following this consultation, the draft Strategic Plan will be reworked in the light of comments received and presented to Council and Congregation by the end of Trinity 2008. It is anticipated that it will then be submitted to HEFCE in the autumn....
Strategies
(a) Ensure that the fruits of the University’s research activities are exploited and disseminated for the benefit of society and the economy....
65. The University supports the move to the digitisation of materials arising from research and has created the Oxford Research Archive (ORA), a permanent, free and secure online archive of selected research output and materials produced by members of the University. This will provide greatly expanded access to Oxford’s research corpus for students as well as other researchers and the public. The University will continue to invest in the development of the ORA and to maintain it at the forefront of public repositories nationally and internationally....
Comment. This is very promising. It's too early to say that Oxford is considering an OA mandate. But the "strategy" is to "ensure" the dissemination of the university's research output, and the draft proposal is to use the institutional repository for "selected" parts of that research output. It could be a mandate, however, and the "selected" parts could include peer-reviewed journal manuscripts. The proposal is part of a consultation, and Oxford-connected friends of OA should make their views known:
Responses should be sent to Mr Jared Hutchings...by the end of ninth week of Hilary Term. Where consent is given, responses will be posted on a Web site.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 2/09/2008 09:28:00 PM.
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.
