Three major publishers of scientific research, including Oxford University Press, will today announce a deal with The Wellcome Trust, the world's second largest charitable funder of medical research after Bill Gates, that will see thousands of research papers available free to everyone over the internet....The Wellcome Trust has emerged as a major proponent of open access and mandates its researchers to place a copy of their finished articles on the web for everyone to see.
Today the Wellcome Trust will announce that three publishers - Blackwell, Oxford University Press and Germany's Springer - have all agreed to change the licences their authors must sign so that research funded by Wellcome but published in their journals can be made freely available online as soon as it is published. The Wellcome Trust is among a number of medical research funders backing a multi-million pound digital research facility, modelled on the US-based PubMed Central, where these articles would be stored. News of the deal will provide support to Research Councils UK (RCUK) - which brings together Britain's eight public research funders. Earlier this year RCUK proposed mandating its researchers to get involved in open access but some traditional publishers attacked the move as putting scientific debate in jeopardy.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/14/2005 10:20:00 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.
