Stephen Pincock, UK setback for open access, The Scientist, November 9, 2004. Excerpt: "The British government has largely rejected the advice of a parliamentary committee that had urged it to support more open access to scientific research, saying on Monday (November 8) that it has no plans to require researchers to deposit copies of their publications in free-access repositories....The committee members immediately labeled the government's response as obstructive and questioned whether the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), which compiled the document, had watered down the views of other government departments and bodies....A spokesman for the DTI told The Scientist that the department was surprised by the statements from the Select Committee. "We submitted a response to their report in the normal way and consulted all the relevant people in government," he said. "JISC and other bodies saw a final draft of the response and as far as we were aware were content with it."...[Stevan] Harnad agreed with the committee's assessment, saying that "the government has declined to implement the select committee's recommendations because they have been persuaded by DTI (who were persuaded by the publisher lobby) that the report recommends mandating OA (author-pays) publishing, whereas it does no such thing: it recommends mandating institutional self-archiving of UK-funded research publications (articles)."...A spokesman for RCUK confirmed that the government's response did not prevent the research councils from implementing the recommendations if they so chose. But a decision on the matter may be some time off, he told The Scientist, as RCUK is in the process of formulating its position on open access and probably won't be finished doing so until some time in early 2005."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/09/2004 02:22:00 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.
