Donald MacLeod, Academics fight to break 'stranglehold' on journals, The Guardian, January 26, 2005. Excerpt: 'Hopes of opening up research findings to a wider readership and breaking the stranglehold of publishers over academic journals will be aired at a conference at Southampton University today. Southampton, the first UK university to make all of its academic and scientific output freely available, announced that its repository will in future be an integral part of its research infrastructure. Advocates of open access won the backing of MPs last year but have not yet succeeded in convincing ministers. The escalating cost of journals - and the rising number published - is a major headache for university libraries, but supporters of open access argue there is a moral case for making findings freely available. They hope it will increase the influence of British science internationally and help researchers in developing countries where expensive journals are hard to access....Professor Stevan Harnad, one of the founders of the open access (OA) movement, argues there are two roads to open access - the 'golden road' of publishing in an OA journal (author-institution pays publication costs instead of user-institution) and the 'green road' of publishing in a non-OA journal but also self-archiving the article in an OA archive. He believes self-archiving by researchers should be mandated by universities and funders such as the research councils. (The influential Wellcome Trust, which awards grants of £1.2bn a year, has come out strongly in favour of open access publishing.)'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/26/2005 08:30:00 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.
