Earlier today I posted a message from Kevin Hawkins on a new OA policy in Russia. Here's a clarification Kevin posted to SOAF:
In a recent posting on the Open Access News blog, Peter Suber quoted a message from me saying that a government agency in Russia recently announced a policy change of its policy on which publications are acceptable venues for publishing the results of thesis research. I said that OA was being mandated for any publication included in this list.
I learned of this while reviewing a conference paper (which said full text must be available online), but it's only now that I translated the new policy that I realized that my initial understanding of it was a too good to be true. Beginning in October, publications in the list of acceptable publications must provide article metadata in OA, and the full text must be available online, either through OA or to subscribers only. My apologies for leading Peter and any other readers astray.
Article 1259 of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation says that works produced by government agencies are not copyrighted, so I have translated the text of the recent decision below....
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Commission for Academic Degrees and Titles of the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation
Decision of the Presidium
from March 7, 2008....
2. To introduce a [new] system of criteria for including publications in the List of Leading Peer-reviewed Scholarly Journals and Publications published in the Russian Federation in which the fundamental scientific research results of dissertations for academic degrees of doctor and candidate of sciences must be published starting October 1, 2008....
System of criteria for inclusion of publications in the List....
Necessary condition: fulfillment by the publication (whether traditional or born-digital) of all of the following criteria: ...
The presence of a full-text version on the Internet. Abstracts, keywords, information on authors, and bibliographies must be available in open access in Russian and English, and full-text versions of the articles must be available in open-access or available only to subscribers....
PS: As I understand it, with Kevin's help, the full-text must be online, but needn't be OA. The abstract and metadata must be OA. (Thanks, Kevin.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/09/2008 11:36:00 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.
