Public Knowledge has publicly released its comment in support of the NIH plan. Excerpt: 'Unfortunately, NIH-funded research is not currently accessible to everyone who could make good use of it....Americans should be proud and grateful that Congress has increased the NIH budget so dramatically over the past five years. But this investment in medical research is undermined by the skyrocketing prices of scientific journals that currently control access to the results. It's untenable that journals should control access to research conducted by others, written up by others, and funded by taxpayers, especially when journals acquire manuscripts without payment and raise their prices faster than inflation. It doesn't matter whether these access barriers are caused by greed, a dysfunctional payment system evolved in the age of print, or innocent market forces. They slow down medical research; they will worsen as the body of published knowledge continues to grow; and open-access technologies now make them unnecessary. As taxpayers, we want to see a better return on our investment in medical research, and we see the NIH proposal as a timely and judicious plan to deliver precisely that.' (Disclaimer: I wrote the comment.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/17/2004 11:12:00 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.
