Tim Lougheed, Providing open access to research, one article at a time, Canadian Medical Association Journal, March 1, 2005. Excerpt: 'Advocates of unrestricted public access to scientific research are moving beyond online journals --which are increasingly available only to subscribers-- toward encouraging researchers to offer direct access to their published work. This practice of self-archiving, initially adopted by the technically eager, is now formally encouraged by many academic agencies, research institutions, and even some of the journals that published the articles in the first place. In January, for example, the Nature Publishing Group started encouraging its authors to self-archive the final version of their articles 6 months post-publication....Self-archiving is integral to the open access initiative, which aims to make scientific research publications as widely and freely available as possible. A cornerstone statement describing open access, drafted at a meeting of the Open Society Institute in Budapest in 2001, carefully distinguishes self-archiving from self-publishing....For others, open access is an ethical issue. Dr. James Till, Senior Scientist Emeritus with Toronto's University Health Network says patients and their advocates need access to the latest research. "If you're trying to decide on the best available treatment, 6 months is a huge amount of time," he says, referring to the Nature policy. "Unless authors can self-archive a final, edited, peer-reviewed version as soon as it's been accepted, in an archive for example, it's not open access." '
Posted by
Peter Suber at 3/02/2005 08:34:00 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.
