Daithí Ó hAnluain, Calls for Open Access Challenge Academic Journals, Online Journalism Review, December 10, 2004. Excerpt: 'It was a bad year for scholarly science publishing. Next year could be worse. This year pressure mounted on publishers to increase access to research. In January, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development issued a declaration endorsed by 34 countries, that more effort was needed to broaden access to publicly funded research. In June the European Commission launched an investigation into the scientific, technical and medical publishing (STM) market. In July, a parliamentary committee in the United Kingdom published a report (PDF) that criticized many science-publishing practices. It urged funding agencies to mandate that publicly funded research be available in public archives. Now the National Institutes of Health wants the results of research it funds to be publicly available, for free, six months after publication in a peer reviewed scientific journal. At $28 billion last year alone, the NIH is the largest single funder of medical research in the world, generating over 60,000 articles a year....Across the world politicians, academics, librarians and patients are calling for greater access to the scientific record. So far, science publishers have resisted pressure to extend access any more than incrementally. The NIH plan increases that pressure....Moreover, the NIH is just one source of the 1.2 million articles published by scientific, medical and technical (STM) journals each year. But it does mark the beginning of a potentially seismic shift in the scholar-publisher relationship. Congress backed the NIH plan, signalling that politicians want public access to publicly funded research, potentially inspiring other governments to take similar action. (PS: This is one of the best attempts I've seen by the mainstream press to put the NIH plan into a larger context. I take issue only with the opening sentence, which presupposes that "science publishing" is limited to publishers who oppose open access.)
Update. Thanks to the flexibility of the Online Journalism Review, Daithí was allowed to change the opening sentence to this: 'It was a bad year for commercial scholarly science publishing.'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/11/2004 01:59:00 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.
