About 90 minutes ago, the UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee released the long-awaited report on its inquiry into journal prices and open access, Scientific Publications: Free for All? Here's my summary of the major recommendations:
The government should provide funds for all UK universities to launch open-access institutional repositories.
Authors of articles based on government-funded research should deposit copies in their institutional repositories.
The government should appoint a "central body" to oversee the launch of the institutional repositories, their networking needs, and their compliance with "technical standards needed to provide maximum functionality" (presumably the OAI metadata harvesting protocol).
The government should create a fund to help authors pay the processing fees charged by open-access journals. The committee is not yet ready to endorse the upfront funding model for OA journals (which it calls the "author-pays" model), but wants to create such a fund in order to promote further experimentation with the model.
The government should develop a wider, long-term open-access strategy, including open-access journals, "as a matter of urgency".
Universities should develop their "capacity to manage" the copyrights that faculty will increasingly retain in the future.
These steps can and should be undertaken without jeopardizing "rigorous and independent peer review".
The government should fund the British Library to take on the long-term preservation of digital scholarship.
Because the market for science and scholarship is international, the government should "act as a proponent for change on the international stage and lead by example".
The full report (a 118 page PDF file) will soon be available at the committee's page of reports. (It's still night time in England.) In a posting to SOAF, I've quoted extensively from the report's conclusions and recommendations, for those who don't have time to read the full report.
Update. The full report is now online (HTML or PDF).
Posted by
Peter Suber at 7/19/2004 08:30:00 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.
