Scientists funded by the UK’s Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) will soon be obliged to deposit copies of their published articles in an online repository “at the earliest opportunity,” the council announced today (June 28). The new archiving requirements will apply to papers arising from grant applications submitted on or after October 1st 2006, and for projects funded at BBSRC-sponsored institutes, the council said in a statement on its Web site.
The BBSRC decision came as part of a wider position statement published today by Research Councils UK, the umbrella body for all of the UK’s seven research councils, which distribute government funds. That long-awaited policy says that researchers funded by any of the councils should deposit their research outputs in a repository. However, it leaves the decision on how and when to implement such a policy up to each of the individual research councils, each of which funds research in different disciplines.
Leaving the decision up to the individual councils was an important point when drafting the statement, said Adrian Pugh from RCUK. “We’ve been aware that there is a huge breadth of variation within the research community and it’s very difficult to capture all the nuances that go across that community,” he told The Scientist....
Today’s statement comes 12 months after RCUK published a draft position statement on this issue. That earlier statement had triggered a hostile reaction from some journal publishers, but Sally Morris, chief executive of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers, told The Scientist she was “much happier with what the RCUK has now done.” For instance, Morris applauded the fact that RCUK had put an emphasis on working with publishers to make the arrangements, and that the policy recognized that different disciplines would respond in different ways....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/28/2006 07:22:00 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.
