Subbiah Arunachalam, Open access and the developing world, National Medical Journal of India, November/December, 2004. (I'm linking to the version that Arun submitted to the NMJI, since the published version is not yet online, even for subscribers.) Excerpt: 'Fortunately, the advent of the Internet and the World Wide Web has also opened up another means to do away with the inequality in the field of accessing research information. Imagine that every author makes the full text of his/her papers (preprints or post-prints) available on the Net so anyone interested in the papers anywhere in the world can access them with a few keystrokes and mouse clicks....A key point is that the cost to archive an article and make it freely available to the entire world in perpetuity is a tiny fraction of the amount to produce the research in the first place. This is, moreover, consistent with public policy goals for what is in large part publicly funded research....Experts such as Stevan Harnad believe that interoperable e-print archives set up by institutions will be better than centralized subject-specific archives....For the developing country institutes, sharing their research with countries facing similar research priorities has clear benefits, and making their research 'visible' internationally will lead to many other advantages. In summary, archiving already published research in interoperable institutional archives greatly benefits global science at almost no cost. This could be done now, without changing established publishing practices. For developing country science and medical research this offers enormous opportunities. Maybe WHO, ICMR, Ministry of Science and Technology and UGC should consider supporting the setting up of OA Archives for medical research publications. Both the National Institutes of Health, USA, and the Joint Information Systems Committee of the UK, are trying to implement mandating of open access archiving of publicly funded research in their respective countries. Developing country governments will do well to mandate that all publicly funded research is made available through interoperable institutional open access archives. India should lead the way for the rest of the developing world.'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 3/07/2005 09:26:00 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.
