Aliya Sternstein, GAO policy reflects security concerns, Federal Computer Week, October 4, 2004. How some U.S. government agencies decide, and how they ought to decide, when to provide open access to their documents and reports. Excerpt: "More than 99 percent of the 1,400 reports, testimonies and legal documents that GAO officials publish annually are listed and available to the public on GAO's Web site. For a publication to be designated NI, or non-Internet, agency officials must convince GAO officials that the document contains information too sensitive to post on the Web. 'We work in concert with the agency to determine an NI designation,' said Jeff Nelligan, GAO's managing director of public affairs. 'The whole point is to make the information not as easily available, given the agencies' concerns.' However, some critics of the policy say the designation appears to be made arbitrarily. 'The only criteria they seem to have is that an agency asks them to do it,' said Patrice McDermott, deputy director of the Office of Government Relations at the American Library Association. 'There are legitimate reasons that information wouldn't be put out on the Internet, but they need to have clear criteria.'...Reports not published on the Web are still available to the public by mail or fax, but only on request....As GAO officials impose access restrictions, their counterparts at the National Institutes of Health have moved toward a completely open publishing policy. In a recent Federal Register notice, NIH officials said all researchers who receive public funding must make the results of their studies, regardless of the content, accessible and free to the public via the agency's Web database, PubMed Central."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/04/2004 08:12:00 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.
