The European Bureau of Library, Information and Documentation Associations (EBLIDA) has released a Statement Towards an Effective Scientific Publishing System for European Research (dated April 2005). Excerpt: 'EBLIDA promotes access to information and culture in the digital environment for the purposes of education, research and private study. EBLIDA supports the vision of open access to research material, which has been defined as 'free availability on the public Internet, permitting users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial legal or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the Internet itself' [PS: quoting the BOAI]. There are two main routes to achieving open access, and we wish to register our support for both. The first one is open access journals....The second route is self-archiving....A growing number of publishers expressly permit self-archiving of the final version of the research output. This is encouraging; however the majority of those publishers do only allow limited use of such self-archived copy....EBLIDA believes that open access to European research is a win-win strategy that has tremendous potential reconciling the ownership of intellectual property rights in research findings and the economic interests of the publishers of such findings....Open Access would be easier to achieve if commercial publishers do not require the assignment of intellectual property rights....In a fair and balanced environment [licensing] terms should allow for the depositing of a copy of the peer reviewed article in an open access local repository or a subject repository and which can be used for private study, research, education and teaching purposes....The current system where outputs of research funded from the public purse have to be bought at a high price from external commercial bodies in order to gain restricted access to the same research outputs needs to be brought to an end as soon as possible.'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/10/2005 08:02:00 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.
