Polly Curtis, Scottish universities sign open access deal, The Guardian, March 14, 2005. Excerpt: 'Scottish university heads have agreed to make their academic research more freely available to one another in a bid to bypass the costly fees for publishing in journals. The new Scottish Declaration on Open Access is the latest in a series of challenges by universities to break the stranglehold of the major academic publishers which costs taxpayers millions of pounds a year. Publicly funded universities have to pay to have their academics' work assessed for publication, then again to read the journals. The declaration commits each of its 16 university signatories to setting up online libraries of research findings and doctorate papers which all academics can access. Universities will also look into developing a joint repository for academic work and some will make it mandatory for academics to publish their work on an open access basis. Funders of research are also considering how they can encourage recipients of their grants to publish their work on an open access basis....Sheila Cannell, the director of library services at the university, added: "We would like to see publicly funded research being publicly available rather than locked up in academic journals." Derek Law, university librarian at the University of Strathclyde said: "There is now clear evidence that open access articles are more frequently cited. If Scottish-based research is made available through open access it will be cited more, which means it will by definition be read more.' (PS: The Scottish Declaration was released in October 2004, though the version at the link above was revised on February 1 of this year.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 3/14/2005 08:10:00 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.
