To be able to climb the shoulders of the scientific giants of Newton's time, access to a limited corpus of written sources, letters, journals and books in libraries and archives was sufficient. Finding your scientific way in the expanding universe of our contemporary global science system requires capacities and facilities of quite another order. Since the brain capacity of researchers has not increased, climbing the ladder to the shoulders of science's giants now calls for access to ever more extensive and complex ICT facilities : giant databases, mega repositories of scientific journals, colossal archives and the contiously expanding Internet to connect researchers with information....[T]he next step in physics demands a Large Hadron Collider that will produce 12 to 14 Petabytes of digital data per year, the full capacity of about 16 million CD ROM's, to be analysed by some 6.000 researchers, scattered around the world, but tightly knit by the Grid computer-network of our global science system. In this way use of ICT has made collections of scientific data in many respects comparable to musical scores: to be used time and again for a diversity of performances by a diversity of artists for the different audiences of society. Optimum access to research data should enable researchers from all over the world to compose the full score for our knowledge based international society. Consequently, access to the gold mine of research data has become quickly a major issue in international science policy and research management. The traditional exchange arrangements between scientific colleagues no longer suffice to guarantee the necessary openness of access to digital data resources. Optimum access requires formal agreements on the conditions of access on the national and international levels....At the meeting at ministerial level of OECD's Committee for Scientific and Technological Policy on January 30, 2004, the ministers responsible for science policy endorsed a Declaration on Access to Research data from Public Funding including a draft set of principles and Guidelines. The Declaration will be an important step towards further international scientific co-operation.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/23/2005 09:30:00 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.
