Yesterday Hannelore Kraft, the State Minister for Science and Research for North Rhine-Westphalia, signed the Berlin Declaration for Open Access to Knowledge. North Rhine-Westphalia is the largest of Germany's 16 states and the first to sign the Declaration. The signature is just part of North Rhine-Westphalia's Digital Peer Publishing initiative (DIPP), launched on the same day. Excerpt from yesterday's press release: "The DIPP initiative, supported by the Ministry of Science with a sum of 600.000 Euros, will finance eight ejournals and their staff based at Northrhine-Westphalian universities and universities of applied science. Both with respect to software and in the handling of legal aspects, the initiative had to enter new territory both in designing new software applications as well as in legal issues. One of the new features are the 'Deutsche Freie Software Lizenz' (DFSL, German Free Software Licence Agreement), a type of exemplary contract for the use of newly developed software, another one is the 'Digital Peer Publishing Licence Agreement' (DPPL), which lays down rules for the further use of the content of material published through this channel....The aim of the North Rhine-Westphalian Initiative is to promote Open Access, the free on-line access to scientific without financial, legal or technical constraints."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/01/2004 09:09:00 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.
