CERN has launched an OA task force to coordinate actions by a group of physics publishers, laboratories, and learned societies, funding agencies, and individual researchers. From today's press release:
A landmark decision has been reached on the future direction of scientific publishing. At a meeting hosted by the CERN on 7-8 December, representatives of several major physics publishers, European particle physics laboratories, learned societies, funding agencies and authors from Europe and the US, came together for the first time to promote open access publishing. Among the results of the meeting was the formation of a task force mandated to bring about action by 2007....Eighty participants attended the meeting, which follows CERN's signature of the Berlin Declaration in May 2004, and takes advantage of the particle physics community's heightened awareness of open access. The creation of the open access task force comes at a crucial time for the particle physics community. In 2007, CERN will launch the field's new flagship facility, the Large Hadron Collider [LHC], and wishes to make the results as widely available as possible. Commenting on the meeting, CERN's Director General Robert Aymar said: "The next phase of LHC experiments at CERN can be a catalyst for a rapid change in the particle physics communication system. CERN's articles are already freely available through its own web site but this is only a partial solution. We wish for the publishing and archiving systems to converge for a more efficient solution which will benefit the global particle physics community."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/14/2005 10:32:00 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.
