Richard Wray, Lancet faces free access competition, The Guardian, October 20, 2004. Excerpt: "The assault on Reed Elsevier's lucrative scientific publications business will increase this week with the launch of an open access competitor to its medical journal the Lancet. The launch of PLoS Medicine, backed by the US Public Library of Science, comes as the government prepares its response to a recent select committee report into scientific publications which called for publicly funded research to be made freely available to all....To date the open access publishing industry has captured a tiny proportion of the overall market but initiatives designed to broaden the number of people who are able to read research are gaining support. Over the summer the Commons science and technology committee recommended that public funding for research should be conditional on the final research report being made freely available through online archives operated either by universities or individual academics. The government is to respond within the next few weeks and is expected to shy away from a direct challenge to established scientific publishers."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/19/2004 10:39:00 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.
