D. Balasubramanian, Open access to journals --a noble movement, The Hindu, September 23, 2004. Excerpt: "A number of new initiatives aimed to provide everyone in the scientific community access to, at least, publicly funded research. These include BioMedCentral which publishes 90 Open Access (OA) journals (where those authors who can, pay up to $ 500 as publication fee while others do not, but all are treated fairly and equally), the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), the Joint Information Systems Committee and the Open Society Institute, which gave rise to the Budapest Open Access Initiative 2001 that brought the OA movement to the forefront....The tide truly turned in our favour with the start of the non-profit Public Library of Science (PLoS) by the Nobelist Harold Varmus, Pat Brown of Stanford and Michael Eisen of Berkeley....Further, actions like this have led the U.S. and U.K. governments to mandate the authors of all government-funded research output to 'self-archive' their work, so as to offer free and open access on the web....The distinguished scientometrist of India, Dr. S. Arunachalam of the MS Swaminathan Foundation Chennai, has been leading the crusade for OA to and from India. He has been requesting all Indian science agencies to follow the U.K. and U.S., lead and to mandate Indian scientists to self-archive their work and allow OA. He points out that this would benefit us to (a) maximize the visibility and impact of India's research output, and by symmetry (b) help create maximal knowledge base for us regarding the rest of the world's research output. I am sure that our science agencies, the University Grants Commission and also the National Informatics Centre will support Dr. Arunachalam in his selfless public-spirited request."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 9/22/2004 07:01:00 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.
