Stevan Harnad, The Implementation of the Berlin Declaration on Open Access, D-Lib Magazine, March 2005. Excerpt: 'Open Access (OA) means immediate, permanent, free online access to the full text of all refereed research journal articles (2.5 million articles a year, published in 24,000 refereed journals, across all disciplines, languages and nations). The Berlin Declaration on Open Access, launched in October 2003, has so far been signed by 55 institutions globally, including large national research institutions such as France's CNRS and Germany's Max-Planck Institutes; national Academies of Science such as those of China, India and the Netherlands; international research institutions such as CERN; and individual universities and research funding agencies around the world....Dr. [Alma] Swan also gave a splendid talk in the special UK session (all videos and powerpoints are now accessible at the Berlin 3 website), reporting her now-famous finding (from 2 international surveys) that although researchers are still extremely uninformed about OA, with only about 25% of them providing OA today, the vast majority (79%) state that they will self-archive their work, and do so willingly --but only if and when their institutions or their research funders require them to do it. And that, of course, became the specific concrete policy recommendation of Berlin 3: Universities, research institutions and research funding agencies should require—as a matter of institutional policy—that their employees/fundees deposit a supplementary copy of each of their published research journal articles into their own institutional OAI-compliant repository....The following new recommendation accordingly emerged from the Berlin 3 meeting (bold emphasis added):
In order to implement the Berlin Declaration institutions should:
(1) Implement a policy to require their researchers to deposit a copy of all their published articles in an open access repository.
and
(2) encourage their researchers to publish their research articles in open access journals where a suitable journal exists and provide the support to enable that to happen.
'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 3/15/2005 01:34:00 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.
