Richard Poynder, U.K. Government Rejects Call to Support Open Access, Information Today, November 15, 2004. Excerpt: 'In a move that has angered members of an influential cross-party committee of British politicians, the U.K. government has rejected their call to make all publicly funded scientific research in Britain freely available on the Web, and declined to intervene in the increasingly bitter dispute over open access (OA)....In rejecting all the main recommendations of the report, the U.K. government response --published by the committee on Nov. 8-- asserts that the government is "not aware that there are major problems in accessing scientific information" and characterizes the publishing industry as "healthy and competitive." While saying that it "recognises the potential benefits of institutional repositories and sees them as a significant development worthy of encouragement," the government nevertheless argues that "each institution has to make its own decision about institutional repositories." Consequently, it says, it has "no present intention to mandate Research Council funded researchers to deposit a copy of their published material in institutional repositories."...But, the debate is far from over. Indeed, OA has become like the mythical Hydra: every time its head is chopped off, it grows two new heads to replace it. Days before the government response was published, for instance, the U.K.-based Wellcome Trust --the world's largest private funder of medical research-- announced plans to introduce a European PubMed Central, and indicated that in the future grantees will be required to make their research freely available on the Web, either via the U.S.-based PubMed Central or the planned European mirror. And in the wake of the U.K. government’s response, pressure is growing on Research Councils UK (RCUK) --through which half (£2.1 billion, or about $3.88 billion) of the U.K.'s publicly funded research is funneled-- to implement its own mandate. Emulating the U.S. plan mooted by the NIH, which has proposed that all NIH-funded research be made freely available in PubMed Central, the RCUK could itself require its funded researchers to self-archive their papers.'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/15/2004 08:55:00 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.
