Colin Steele, World's knowledge base should be open to all: Are you free? Australia well placed to react to UK open access initiatives, unabridged edition of an article from the Australian Financial Review, July 26, 2004. Excerpt: "University and institutional researchers create a large part of the world's knowledge base. Researchers tend to give away their intellectual output free of charge to large multinational publishers who generate hundreds of millions of dollars of profits annually....[But things are changing.] Less than a week after a US Congressional Committee called for open access to research funded by National Institutes of Health, Britain's prestigious House Of Commons Science and Technology Committee has issued a major Report: Scientific Publications: Free for All?...In Australia Open Access developments have been ahead of the international pack....The National Scholarly Communications Forum (NSCF), a body sponsored by the four Australian learned Academies, has provided important leadership in this area....The NSCF recommends Australian research accessibility to be widened through open access research initiatives within institutions, particularly through the encouragement of institutional repositories, including the adoption of universitywide policies to collect and archive institutional research output, for example in connection with RAE exercises and the adoption of further open access mechanisms, such as open access journals and not-for-profit electronic publishing."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 7/31/2004 08:38:00 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.
