Today JISC made the announcement previewed yesterday by Saeed Shah in The Independent. From the JISC announcement: 'Following a remarkable year for the spread of open access ideas and the gathering of momentum for real change, the New Year begins with an announcement by JISC of the winners of funding under the second round of its Open Access programme. Following the success of the first year of the JISC programme, the decision has been made to award five publishers funds to support open access delivery for their journals. A total of £150,000 will be awarded to some of the key scholarly publications in their fields. These journals are: The New Journal of Physics (published by the Institute of Physics Publishing); Nucleic Acids Research (Oxford University Press); Journal of Medical Genetics (British Medical Journals); the journals of the International Union of Crystallography (IUCr); and The Journal of Experimental Botany (The Society for Experimental Biology). JISC funding will ensure the waiving of all or part of the submission/publication fees for all UK HE authors....[As a result of the first year of funding] the New Journal of Physics has seen UK submissions increase by 300% in the last six months, while access to articles from UK users has risen 71%. The journal’s impact factor has risen from 1.76 to 2.48....A further round of funding will be made available to the publishing community later in 2005.'
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.
