... We have prepared some very focused questions for the EU-parliament candidates; the candidates’ replies will then be distributed in the research community. The purpose of these questions is to elicit and reveal the current problems at the EU-level in moving legislation and policy towards a stable and reliable support for research information in the digital era through Open Access (while continuing to leave it entirely in the hands of researchers what and where they wish to publish).
How will you communicate with researchers to learn and understand their needs for legislation? Are you aware that research organizations worldwide are unanimously calling for Open Access ...[?]
Are you aware of the EC recommendations in favour of mandating OA and of the petition for mandating OA, so far signed by 27.000 European researchers and research organisations? ...
Are you aware of the international status of the recommendations by science organisations regarding Open Access (UNESCO, SPARC, ….). And will you communicate with them?
Are your aware that leading universities in the world have adopted a mandate to provide Open Access for all of their authors’ refereed research journal article output ... and that most universities and research institutes now have an Open Access repository for the digital copies of their authors’ research output?
Are you aware that there is a specific European Community, the scientists, for whom no specific legislation yet exists to meet their needs for doing research effectively? On the contrary, the present legislation misuses ‘copyright law’ to bundle these special, give-away authors in a legislative framework designed exclusively for trade authors (who earn their living by publishing for the general consumer). The result is that this deprives their publicly funded research of its full potential usage and impact. The result is subscription and license toll-barriers blocking researcher access to give-away research.
Will you help bring attention to the need [for] legislation that treats publicly funded give-away research publications differently from royalty-seeeking trade publications?
The question is: Will the EU design the specific legislation required by scientific and scholarly research, or will it persist in treating the needs and works of publicly-funded scientific researchers as if they were the same as those of trade authors? ...
Update. Updated to reflect the amended post.
Posted by
Gavin Baker at 5/22/2009 04:04:00 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.
