Andy Gass, Open Access As Public Policy, Public Library of Science, released September 3 in advance of publication September 21 in the October issue of PLoS Biology. Excerpt: "After months of often dizzying rhetoric from virtually all camps, one concrete development has indisputably emerged from the fray: governments around the world have begun to take an interest in the question of who can and can’t read the results of the scientific research they fund. 'We are convinced,' concluded a recent report from the Science and Technology Committee of the United Kingdom's House of Commons, 'that the amount of public money invested in scientific research and its outputs is sufficient to merit Government involvement in the publishing process' (House of Commons Science and Technology Committee 2004). United States National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Elias Zerhouni echoed the British assessment, asserting that 'the public needs to have access to what they've paid for,' in a July 28 meeting of stakeholders in scientific and medical publishing. 'The status quo,' he added, 'just can't stand'....Actually requiring that publicly funded works be included in [preexisting] publicly funded electronic archives like PubMed Central, as the US Congress might, would be less a paradigm shift or a radically interventionist mandate than a sensible extension of existing policy for most governments and their funding agencies. Increasingly, it seems, this is the view being adopted by policy makers --that it is the status quo, rather than prospective policy revision, that is anomalous or hard to justify."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 9/05/2004 01:11:00 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.
