A boost to open access, The Hindu, April 2, 2009. An editorial. (Thanks to Subbiah Arunachalam.) Excerpt:
In yet another initiative favouring the scientific community, President Barack Obama recently signed into law the 2009 Consolidated Appropriations Bill that includes a provision making the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) public access policy permanent....The rationale is simple: research carried out using government funding should be freely available to everybody and not be locked up in subscription-based journals. It is established that freely accessible papers are read by a larger number of people than online content that is priced....
However, despite its unquestionable benefits, the revised policy faces a challenge. A retrogressive bill — the Fair Copyright in Research Works Act — reintroduced in February 2009 aims at overturning the free access policy. The opposition stems from the fact that commercial publishers would no longer enjoy full rights over a large number of papers submitted to their journals. While the policy does not take away the publisher’s right to assert ownership over the paper’s copyright, it requires researchers to ensure that the copyright transfer agreement they sign with the publisher permits them to submit their papers to the NIH. The hollowness of the special interest opposition is exposed by the fact that the public access policy does not apply to papers already published, and it is within the right of publishers not to entertain papers where the authors would permit the NIH to make the content available in the online archive. The concept of open access is gaining greater acceptance among forward-looking publishers. Many open-access journals exist, and several subscription-based journals make papers freely available after a certain period of time. What needs to be remembered is that it is in the nature and spirit of science to seek open access.
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.
