Dan Milmo, Lancet publisher scathing about university funding in UK, The Guardian, February 18, 2005. Elsevier CEO Crispin Davis has criticized the UK government for inadequate funding of UK universities. Excerpt: 'The state of university funding in the UK is "unacceptable" and the government must act to preserve the global reputation of British academic institutions, the chief executive of media group Reed Elsevier said yesterday....In recent years the business has not fired on all cylinders, with an advertising downturn blighting its trade magazine business and pressure on academic library budgets affecting its scientific and medical journal division. Sir Crispin entered the debate on university funding by warning that the "right decisions" needed to be made to ensure that British universities produced high-quality research....Among some academics, the pressure on library budgets has created an interest in open access publishing, where scientific research is made freely available to everyone over the internet.'
(PS: He's right about the funding, of course, and his critique shouldn't be dismissed just because he's an interested advocate. But we should ask the background question: Would adequately funded universities still be interested in OA? The answer is that they definitely would be, and are (see examples here and here), and that they are interested in OA for the same reasons that they are interested in discovering new knowledge, disseminating it, and taking advantage of new technologies to do it better.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 2/19/2005 07:23:00 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.
