With a captive audience forced to play by the rules of juried publications, scholarly publishers are in effect taxing national economies who play by these rules. No small wonder, then that one of the report's key recommendations is to have the U.K. government step in and regulate the licensing of scholarly content. Hopefully the scholarly publishing industry can come to a better conclusion on their own. But with emerging markets such as China and India beginning to become research powers in their own right the nations that have been sponsoring scholarly publishing services up to now may find that they have more to lose in intellectual prowess to these developing nations if they don't step up support for more open access to scholarly research some time soon.
PS: BTW, the UK government has taken two steps to "regulate the licensing of scholarly content" since this report came out. See my note on both in today's issue of SOAN.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/02/2006 03:10:00 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.
