Matthew Cockerill, Access all articles, The Guardian, June 2, 2005. An excellent introduction to OA. Excerpt: '"Sorry, but this article is available only to subscribers." Try to view a science journal article online and, more often than not, that is the message you will see. This is not just a problem for members of the public - scientists and medical practitioners face it every day. There are so many science journals that no library can afford to subscribe to them all. The internet has the potential to give researchers instant access to all the information they need, but this potential is not exploited because scientific journals still operate a subscription-based model inherited from the days of print publishing....For the past few years, however, change has been brewing. The research funders, who spend hundreds of millions of pounds each year on scientific research in the first place, have grown impatient with traditional publishers, who take an exclusive license to all the research findings that are published in their journals and then sell limited access back to the scientific community. Funders realise that the scientific literature represents a distillation of the knowledge that has been obtained at huge expense through the research they have paid for. The literature is an extremely valuable resource, so why should they surrender control of it to publishers who are responsible only for the final stage of the process? In many cases, funders do not even have full access to the research they themselves have funded: a recent study found that fewer than half of the articles resulting from NHS research grants ends up accessible online to NHS employees. Scientists, too, want as many people as possible to see their research, since the wider the readership, the greater the impact the research will have and the more it will benefit their career....It is against this background that the Wellcome Trust, the UK's biggest non-governmental funder of biomedical research, has taken the historic step of announcing that, from October 1 2005, recipients of its funding will be required to deposit a copy of all resulting research articles in an online archive, and that this archive will make those articles freely available within six months of publication....It cannot be overemphasised how significant a change this represents for science.'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/02/2005 07:38:00 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.
