Scientists from Brazil, China, Ethiopia, India and South Africa have set guidelines for developing countries to freely access publicly funded research....
The guidelines were agreed at a workshop in Bangalore, India earlier this month (2-3 November) where 44 international participants — including scientists and policymakers — discussed ways to promote open access....
Scientists in the developing world have long complained that their work is invisible to scientists in North America and Europe, said Alma Swan, co-director of Key Perspectives Ltd, a UK consultancy company for scholarly information. "Now the developing world has the opportunity to create the level playing field it has so long cried out for," she told SciDev.Net.
While participants agreed on the policy, there was lively debate on how to make governments adopt it, Barbara Kirsop, secretary of the UK-based Electronic Publishing Trust, told SciDev.Net....
Their policy urges governments to require all publicly funded research published in peer-reviewed journals be deposited in an institutional digital database as soon as publication is accepted. This should be a condition for research funding for any papers partly or fully funded by the government.
Eve Gray, a fellow at the Open Society Institute in South Africa said that policymakers in governments and institutions have the power to determine the reach of scientific research. "They can make [the research] instantly visible, or they can fail their staff," she told SciDev.Net....
The workshop revealed that Bioline, an online publisher for developing countries, saw a huge increase in requests for scholarly papers when it became open access. This shows "how much information was unused, unknown, un-accessed before open access", says Kirsop....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/29/2006 07:49:00 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.
