[T]he Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has also begun mulling over the question of open access (OA). "According to my contact in China," says Jan Velterop, director of open access at the STM journal publisher Springer, "the Chinese Academy of Sciences is now in the process of organising a group of prominent scientists to issue an open call to Chinese funding agencies, and research and educational institutes, to promote open access." To this end, adds Velterop, the Academy is currently working on a draft document for scientists to review. It is also in the early stages of developing institutional operating policy guidelines for CAS to enable it to support open access. These developments come in the wake of an international meeting held at the Beijing-based CAS in June....[S]ays Key Perspective's Alma Swan, who gave a presentation at the Beijing meeting: "The amount of Chinese science being published is growing rapidly but much of it remains largely invisible to the rest of the world. Although some of the best is published in 'western' journals — there has been a 1500% increase in the number of Chinese articles indexed by ISI over the last 20 years — an enormous amount of Chinese research is tucked away in Chinese journals that are hard to get at. There are 2000 Chinese university journals, for example, and the vast majority of those are not indexed by any of the major indexing services. Chinese science is hiding its light under the proverbial bushel."...As one of the delegates who attended the Beijing meeting — speaking on condition of anonymity — put it: "Whatever the outcome of the current initiatives in the UK and China, those commercial publishers and learned societies who continue to resist open access are holding their fingers in a dyke that will, sooner or later, inevitably burst. The only issue for them now, therefore, is whether they learn to swim in the open waters, or choose to drown."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/05/2005 10:51:00 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.
