Bernard Rentier, Faux départ !, Bernard Rentier, Recteur, June 22, 2009. Read it in the original French or Google's English.
I certainly rushed some things in announcing last week the launch of the [Enabling Open Scholarship] website. The next day we had an important meeting of the founders of the EOS group that I chair and we have decided that the site still requires some work, some improvements, a more recent update and a finalization of the Advisory Board. ... Embarrassing, especially since ... applications for membership in EOS abounded on every side from the first day! Hopefully this incident will not adversely affect the participation of many universities at the final launch ...
The role of the EOS site, in fact, will be mainly to rally the leaders of universities worldwide, to convince them to set up institutional repositories and help them. Its second goal is to persuade funders of the importance of free access to the publications of research they have funded and the need to develop systems to harvest from institutional repositories. For us, [Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique], signatory of the Berlin Declaration on open access, is expected to speak out soon in this regard. ... French-speaking Belgium thus could become the first "country" to adopt this system in its entirety, which should serve the cause of our researchers and their reputation.
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.
