The European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, has issued a report that recommends open access to all publicly financed research....The report calls for a “guarantee” of open access. It recommends creating that guarantee by having researchers put copies of published articles in online archives that are free to all. Such a step would be stronger than the one taken nearly a year ago by the National Institutes of Health, which merely requested that its grantees put copies of their published articles in the agency’s own online repository, PubMed Central....Open-access advocates, including Peter Suber, director of the Open Access Project at Public Knowledge, a nonprofit group that advocates the free flow of information, hope the report will spur national governments --or even all of Europe-- to make such public archiving mandatory. (Mr. Suber has blogged about the report here.) But scientific publishers fear that if research papers are free on the Web, readers may stop paying for subscriptions.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 4/20/2006 10:03:00 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.
