Lucy Sherriff, Southampton Uni goes Open Access, The Register, January 10, 2005. Excerpt: 'Southampton University has made all of its academic and scientific research output available for free on the web. The University said the decision marks a new era in Open Access to research in the UK; it will host workshops for other academic institutions thinking of making a similar transition. Southampton describes the self-archiving project's purpose as "to make the full text of the peer-reviewed research output of scholars/scientists and their institutions visible, accessible, harvestable, searchable and useable by any potential user with access to the Internet". This is not a bypass of the traditional publishing mechanism, but another form of access to already published material....Southampton's ePrints database has run as an experiment since 2002. It was established as part of a project to explore issues around Open Access publishing. The repository provides a publications database with full text, multimedia and research data, and it will now become a core part of the university's publishing process. "We see our Institutional Repository as a key tool for the stewardship of the University's digital research assets," said Professor Paul Curran, deputy vice-chancellor of the University. "It will provide greater access to our research, as well as offering a valuable mechanism for reporting and recording it. "The University has been committed to Open Access for many years. The fact that we are now supporting it with core funding is another tangible step towards its full achievement."'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/10/2005 10:29:00 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.
