Vivian Siegel, writing for the Public Library of Science, has released her August 5 letter to Elias Zerhouni in support of the NIH open-access plan. Excerpt: "It is not only appropriate but necessary that NIH should take steps to ensure that the results of government-funded research are publicly available. Certainly as a matter of principle, citizens should be able read the reports of important clinical and scientific studies that their tax dollars pay for, and that they sometimes participate in....There is no question, then, that NIH must intervene to change the status quo....Certainly, different publishers of scientific and medical journals rely on different business models. However, support for the mandatory deposition of NIH-funded research articles in PubMed Central has been expressed by publishers and scientific societies of all stripes --from the National Academy of Science to the American Society for Cell Biology to, indeed, the Public Library of Science. The breadth of these endorsements suggests that increased access to the results of government-sponsored research is compatible with conventional business models in scientific publishing, as well as the more recently developed 'open access' business model."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 9/05/2004 01:22:00 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.
