Peter Suber, Public should have free access to research it funds, Tallahassee Democrat, September 21, 2004. Excerpt: "Rising journal prices, limited subscriptions, forced cancellations, and the background model of metered knowledge have slowed down medical research and subverted our enormous national investment in it. We may not know when we're spending enough on medical research, but we know that access barriers limit the usefulness of knowledge. Open access will make this research as useful as it can be, which we deserve as taxpayers as well as beneficiaries of medical advances....Scientific journals do not pay authors for their articles. Nor in most cases do they pay the referees whose professional judgments facilitate the peer-review process. When the 'talent' is giving away its work in this way (a tradition in science since 1665), and the research costs are paid by taxpayers, then there is no excuse for unnecessary access barriers. In the age of print, there were unavoidable access barriers based on print itself...[b]ut the Internet allows us to distribute perfect copies to a worldwide audience at virtually no cost. This convergence of factors has led a growing number of scientists to call for open access to all scientific research. In a compromise, the House Appropriations Committee and the NIH are saying that we should start with taxpayer-funded medical research....The plan does not interfere with copyright. It does not bypass or modify peer review. It does not tell scientists what to write or journals what to publish. It's good for science, good for medicine, good for health-care providers, good for patients, and good for taxpayers." (PS: The Tallahassee Democrat is a Knight Ridder Tribune paper, and the same op-ed may soon appear in other KRT papers.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 9/21/2004 08:44:00 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.
