Amanda Schaffer, Open Access: Should scientific articles be available online and free to the public?Slate, December 14, 2004. Excerpt: 'Increased access is a worthwhile enterprise. Highly accessible, electronic archives are simply too valuable to scientists --and, by extension, to the public who may eventually benefit from their work-- not to establish and support as a matter of public policy. Scientists at large research universities have access to many journals, but increasingly there are gaps in library collections, and not all publications are easily searchable. The problem is of course even worse outside of major institutions and in countries other than the United States. A more robust public database would go a long way toward speeding and enhancing scientific work. There is, in fact, precedent for this approach to biological data. For over a decade now, NIH grantees generating DNA sequence have been expected to make their findings available in GenBank, an online government archive. Thus, there is now an extensive, easily searchable archive of sequences that has greatly facilitated research in many areas of biology and medicine. PLoS's Eisen suggests that GenBank provides a model for how biological work in general should be treated. If more full-text articles were similarly available through PubMed Central, he argues, the benefits to research would likely be vast.'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/14/2004 07:21:00 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.
