I am appalled at the recent statement made by the Royal Society regarding access to research publications. Apart from misunderstanding the proposals made by the Research Councils UK (RCUK), the following statement indicates the total lack of understanding of the world’s research needs:
“A young post-doctoral researcher in mathematics at an Ethiopian university has different needs and different means compared with an established senior research fellow in pharmacology [at] a UK company's laboratory.”
What are the different needs of an Ethiopian scientist, pray? Researchers everywhere need access to the world’s research information. Those that are less privileged need it most. The advent of the open access archiving policies, now widely accepted by visionary academics, solves the problem and greatly strengthens the international scientific communities and our ability to solve global problems (think only of bird flu, AIDS, environmental disasters, climate change). Institutional Repositories (IRs) require the continuance of journals, as 92% of 9000 publishers asked have accepted, including enlightened S&T publishers such as Elsevier. The aim of IRs is not the demise of journals, but quite the contrary.
It is shameful that one of our most senior scientific bodies misstates the present OA situation and dismisses the needs of poorer nations. Thankfully, this is not the case of such organisations as UNESCO, ICSU, CODATA, IFLA, CERN, CNRS, INSERM, INRA, INRIA, and all universities in the Netherlands and Scotland, many universities in the UK, USA, Australia, Canada...and recently of WSIS. All these support the concept of institutional repositories for publicly funded and published research results. The Royal Society should join with the international scientific community in embracing the new technology that has such huge potential for science and the economies of the poorer countries.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/28/2005 03:00:00 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.
