Richard Wray, Keystroke strategy for open access, The Guardian, March 1, 2005. Excerpt: 'The movement to increase free online access to scientific research will receive a boost today as academics, publishers and librarians thrash out a new plan for open access....[A]t a two-day meeting in Southampton yesterday and today, delegates from across the world of scientific publishing will be presented with a new plan for open access. Stevan Harnad, professor of cognitive science at the University of Southampton, will present a proposal that could revolutionise how academics and the public view research....Known as the "keystroke strategy", Prof Harnad's plan, which has already been put in place at his own university, calls for all academics who have had research papers accepted by journals to place information about the paper - such as its title and author, known as metadata - on a university's own archive for all to see. Alongside that should be a copy of the article itself. He also believes that universities and research funders should require that their researchers comply. Some universities already do this and a statement from the UK's major research councils about this subject is expected soon. The keystroke comes into play because some publishers will not allow publication of articles elsewhere. Prof Harnad and others are proposing that academics prepare both their metadata and articles for publication, publish their metadata and then decide whether or not to hit the final key to upload the article.'
On other subjects: 'Delegates to the Berlin No 3 open access conference yesterday, however, heard Alma Swan, of the market researchers Key Perspectives, who has studied the impact of a long-established physics repository on two learned societies. She found their journal subscriptions had merely declined in line with the rest of the market and "learned societies are not going bankrupt as a result of self-archiving"....Delegates also heard from Tony Hey, who works with the government as director of E-Science UK to foster better sharing of scientific data, about recent steps to have not just research but data freely available on the internet from research laboratories such as Cern in Switzerland. "We're trying to do what the internet was built for," he said.'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 2/28/2005 10:04:00 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.
