If you remember, in June 2008 a group of important German research institutions and funding agencies launched the Allianz der deutschen Wissenschaftsorganisationen (Alliance of German Science Organizations), which committed itself to support green and gold OA, among other goals.
Equipping scientists and scholars with the information infrastructure best suited to meeting their research needs is the guiding principle of this priority initiative. In the digital age, this entails digital access to publications, primary research data, and virtual research and communication environments, available to the user without costs or other barriers. It also requires a sustainable, integrated digital research environment that can provide all German researchers the broadest possible access to published knowledge and the relevant primary research data....
The Alliance of German Science Organisations therefore agree to coordinate the activities of the individual partner organisations and to expand on the ideal of the innovative information environment by means of a Joint Priority Initiative from 2008 to 2012 with the following goals:
to guarantee the broadest possible access to digital publications, digital data and other source materials
to utilise digital media to create the ideal conditions for the distribution and reception of publications related to German research....
The Priority Areas in Detail ...
Priority Area 2: Open Access
The term Open Access describes the goal of making knowledge globally accessible and usable in digital form without financial, technical or legal barriers....
The activities of the Alliance’s existing Open Access working group – perhaps including further members – will be stepped up, so that the open access to texts, primary data and other digital objects can be promoted and implemented by means of science policy and other concrete steps.
A primary goal of this Priority Area is to expand the scope and network of institutional and disciplinary digital repositories. To achieve this, incentives will be developed in the context of the alliance’s activities: First – with reference to the research institutions – to undertake the standardisation, networking and quality assurance of publication servers; and second – with reference to the individual scientists and scholars – to make (secondary) publications available via the so-called “green road” of Open Access.
The second essential goal is to further develop the so-called “golden road” of Open Access (an article is freely accessible as soon as it is published in a journal) through coordinated action. This will require the development of new business and funding models as well as new forms of cooperative financing. Pilot projects will be used to track the way in which subscription fees and publication costs can be correlated and/or rearranged. Models will be developed and tested in discipline-specific settings with the goal of financing publication costs as the final step of the research process. Suitable budgetary measures must be developed to ensure that research budgets are not strained as a result....
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.
