Crucially, the NIH policy only "requests" researchers to deposit their articles, whereas RCUK uses the word "require". The statement stresses that "a copy of any resultant published journal articles or conference proceedings should be deposited in an appropriate e-print repository (either institutional or subject-based) wherever such a repository is available to the award-holder." However, this statement is hedged around by some translucent statements about two key issues: how to address the problem of publishers who hold the copyright to post-print articles restricting deposit, and the timing of deposit. The draft statement includes the phrase "subject to copyright and licensing arrangements", which suggests that authors require publisher consent to deposit. In addition, the statement requires deposit "at the earliest opportunity, wherever possible at or around the time of publication", refusing to place a time limit on deposit and actively contradict the typical current publisher policy of stipulating an embargo of six months to a year on deposit....Open access enthusiasts such as Peter Suber have celebrated the strong language, while the response from the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) has concentrated hard on the need to preserve publisher embargo times of a year (and sometimes beyond). Clearly most publishers are not going to allow articles which have been peer-reviewed, formatted, surrounded by metadata and linked accurately to other articles to be immediately deposited in a place where they can be easily found by search engines, if they believe that this will lead to their deriving too little revenue for the value-add efforts....Apart from a handful of enthusiasts, the academic community has not shown major levels of interest in the open access movement.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 7/05/2005 01:12:00 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.
