The push for open access to publicly funded academic research was boosted yesterday as an umbrella body supported placing subscription journals' articles on the internet for free. But the body, Research Councils UK, whose eight members grant to academics an annual £2.5bn of public money, appears to have watered down its initial support for open access.
The body’s preliminary proposal, outlined a year ago, suggested making it a condition of the grants that researchers put work into freely available online archives as soon as possible. Yesterday the body backtracked, saying it was up to the eight councils themselves to decide whether or not to demand researchers got involved in open access....
The Medical Research Council, the Economic and Social Research Council, and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, have all opted to make online archiving a requirement of grants from this October. The Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils said merely that researchers "should" archive. The remaining four councils have yet to rule on the issue.
While the position of the umbrella body was applauded by the Wellcome Trust and by JISC, the body responsible for coordinating IT in higher education, others involved in open access initiatives were less impressed.
Stevan Harnad, from the University of Southampton, in Hampshire, which backs open access, said "The green light to allow individual funding councils to decide for themselves whether or not to mandate open access self-archiving is good and bad". He said: "It is good that individual councils will be able to mandate it if they wish, bad that consensus by all the councils could not be reached."
Update. Wray now has a revised and longer version of this article, same title, same date, same paper, different URL.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/29/2006 01:02:00 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.
