The chief public funding body for medical research in the United States, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), is introducing a mandatory open access policy from next week....
This is the latest policy from key research funders to promote open access to research findings (table). It is based on the argument that the public should have free access to results from research that it has funded, and researchers should have free access to papers they have written or reviewed rather than have to pay subscriptions or single access fees to journals. Open access publishing also makes research freely available to help advance research around the world....
Policies mandating open access to publicly funded research have been in place in Europe for some time....
Universities are also starting to require their staff members to make their papers freely available. In February Harvard University’s faculty of arts and sciences...adopted a policy that will put faculty members’ papers in an open access repository hosted by the university....
[One] problem is enforcing open access policies. “They are not easy to monitor in practice,” acknowledges Tony Peatfield, head of corporate governance at the MRC [UK Medical Research Council]....
It is still relatively early days to determine the effects of open access policies. Mr Peatfield reported that some researchers funded by the MRC have found that journals without open access arrangements have introduced mechanisms to facilitate this when necessary. Research so far has indicated that researchers may gain greater exposure for their work because studies have shown that open access articles are cited more often than non-open access articles from the same journal....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 3/28/2008 01:09:00 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.
