A group of UK academics including Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the world wide web, has called on the government and public bodies that fund academic research to ensure anybody can view publicly funded research for free on the system he helped develop. In an open letter to the science minister Lord Sainsbury and Research Councils UK (RCUK) - which brings together Britain's eight public backers of research - Sir Tim and seven other academics have launched a stinging attack on moves by traditional scientific publishers to prevent the public dissemination of research. They call on the RCUK to press ahead with plans to mandate its funded researchers to place a copy of their research in an online archive, usually connected with a university, as soon as possible and preferably at the same time as it appears in a subscription-based journal. "Due to the current constraints on the accessibility of research results, the potential of British scholarship is not being maximised," the letter reads. "Yet the constraints on accessibility can now, in the digital age, be eliminated completely, to the benefit of the UK economy and society, exactly in the way RCUK has proposed."...Earlier this month the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP), which represents not-for-profit academic publishers, warned that pressing ahead with open access "would accelerate the move to a disastrous scenario in which the free availability of 'good enough' versions of journal articles will allow cash-strapped librarians to save money by cancelling subscriptions". The letter, signed by Sir Tim, chairman of the school of electronics and computer science at Southampton University, alongside open access proponent and fellow Southampton University academic Professor Stevan Harnad, includes a line-by-line rebuttal of the ALPSP's arguments against open access....In their letter, the supporters of open access produce evidence that in physics - where self-archiving has been carried out for years - major learned societies "cannot identify any loss of subscriptions to their journals as a result of this critical mass of self-archived and readily retrievable physics articles".
Posted by
Peter Suber at 8/29/2005 10:12:00 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.
