David Dickson, Open access archiving: an idea whose time has come?SciDev.Net, March 7, 2005. Excerpt: 'As controversy continues around demands for open access to refereed published research, significant progress is being made by those campaigning for the more modest goal of applying the same open access principles to archiving. Researchers in developing countries are among those with much to gain....Last week the movement took another important step forward when many of the same proponents, meeting in Southampton University in the United Kingdom, reached consensus on a resolution stating that institutions who agreed to sign up to the Berlin declaration should "implement a policy to require their researchers to deposit a copy of all their published articles in an open access repository." Significantly, this commitment was given priority over a second one, encouraging researchers to publish their papers in open access journals "and provide the support to enable that to happen"....But if the OA publishing model is still struggling to gain acceptance, open access archiving, in contrast, is moving ahead robustly....Last week's meeting in Southampton, for example, heard from organisations already [setting up institutional repositories] that range from the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) to the Max Planck Institutes in Germany, the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in France, and all universities in the Netherlands....At the same time, scientific publishers are becoming more amenable to adapting their copyright rules in a way that gives scientific authors the right — under certain conditions — to publish their papers in institutional archives....But so far, the uptake of OA archiving in developing countries has been relatively low....There are various reasons for this slow response. One factor is an economic one....Another may be the innate conservatism that many universities in the developing world have inherited — and in some cases maintained — from their colonial past....A further dampening factor may, ironically, be the success of various schemes that have been introduced (with publishers' support) to give the poorest developing countries subsidized access to selected journals in a way that is free to the end user....Looked at in terms of local capacity building, therefore, OA archiving should be given much higher attention in policy circles within developing countries that it does at present....At the follow-up to the Southampton meeting, which is due to take place in Potsdam, Germany, in October this year, one participating organisation, the Electronic Publishing Trust for Development, is already proposing a session on OA and developing countries.' (Thanks to Barbara Kirsop.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 3/07/2005 07:19:00 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.
