Richard Poynder, British Politicians Call on U.K. Government to Support Open Access, Information Today, July 26, 2004. Excerpt: "Following 7 months of deliberation, the U.K. House of Commons’ Science and Technology Committee has concluded that the current model for scientific publishing is unsatisfactory, and it has called on the U.K. government to support open access (OA)....Indeed the U.K. government may well reject the committee's recommendations: While it is obliged to respond, it does not have to act on the report. Nevertheless, suggested Rick Johnson, director of OA advocacy group SPARC, the case for open access is now so overwhelming that it is only a matter of time, and regardless of the fate of specific proposals there is a 'cumulative impact' evident. 'What is emerging is a broad recognition that taxpayer-funded research is a public good, and a public good that funders get more value out of from use, rather than from supporting a system that makes research a scarce good, and so drives up the price and restricts access.' Examples of the growing pressure to implement OA are not hard to find. The week before the U.K. report was published, the U.S. House of Representatives' Committee on Appropriations recommended that NIH --the largest science funder in the U.S. federal government-- provide free public access to research articles resulting from NIH-funded research 6 months after publication. And last month, following the example of the U.K., the EU commissioned a study of the STM publishing markets in Europe. But perhaps there is no better evidence of the traction OA now has than the positive spin placed on the U.K. report by Derk Haank, CEO of Springer (and former chairman of Elsevier Science), who appears to have concluded that traditional publishers now have little choice but to respond to calls for OA."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 7/25/2004 11:02:00 AM.
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.
