Stephen Pincock, UK committee backs open access, The Scientist, July 20, 2004. Excerpt: "Jan Velterop, publisher of BioMedCentral, a for-profit publisher of open-access journals, called the report an important milestone in the open-access movement. (BioMedCentral is a partner with The Scientist.) 'The overall report...is really a ringing endorsement of the whole concept of open access to scientific material,' Velterop said. 'It definitely is a major development. I even think that with hindsight, we may look back on this as a turning point.'...Peter Suber, an open-access advocate at Earlham College in Richmond, Ind., said he was delighted that the report 'doesn't merely endorse open access, but calls for a national commitment to open access --encompassing all UK higher education institutions, the British Library, the research councils, the government funding agencies, and government policymakers. The report recommends many steps, but properly focuses on the one step that will do the most good: asking government funding agencies to put an open-access condition on research grants and requiring grantees to deposit the full-text articles based on funded research in open-access repositories,' Suber told The Scientist....Just last week, the US House of Representatives Appropriations Committee also recommended that the National Institutes for Health (NIH) make research it funds freely available."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 7/20/2004 10:11:00 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.
