The open-access movement
chalked up a victory in Britain last week,
but it did not get the universal mandate for free
release of research papers that some advocates
want. In a long-delayed policy statement on
28 June, the executive board of Research Councils
U.K. (RCUK), an umbrella organization for
government funding bodies, said that all peerreviewed
journal papers produced by publicly
funded research must be made available for free
soon after they’re completed. Exactly what that
means was not specified, and RCUK left each
research council to set its own rules. In coordinated
announcements, some set out hard-edged
policies whereas others said they were still
debating what to do....
The news that MRC [Medical Research Council] is setting hard deadlines [an OA mandate with a maximum six-month delay] won praise from some advocates of open
access, such as BioMed Central, a London-based
commercial scientific publisher funded
by billing authors rather than readers. “It was
a very important step,” says publisher
Matthew Cockerill. “Not many other funding institutions have gone as far.”...
Cockerill was also encouraged by a sentence
in the MRC announcement indicating that the
government may pay the costs of publishing in
open-access journals....[BMC and PLoS hare recently raised their fees, and the Royal Society is starting out with high fees.] No-subscription
publishing can be very expensive, says
London-based consultant Mary Waltham, “and
many publishers were disappointed” last week
to see that RCUK did not back its open-access
policy with a promise of new financial support.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 7/12/2006 05:08:00 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.
