Robert Terry, Funding the Way to Open Access, PLoS Biology, March 2005. Excerpt: 'Imagine this scenario. You're the director of one of the world's largest medical research charities, and you receive notification from one of your funded investigators in Africa reporting some exciting progress toward the development of a vaccine for malaria. The work has just been published, so you log onto the Web to do a quick keyword search, and a link to the article is brought up on your screen. Then imagine the frustration when you click on the link to read the message, "Access Denied --access to this journal is restricted to registered institutional and individual subscribers." And there's the rub: this actually happened to the Director of the Wellcome Trust....I now believe it is the funders of research --charities, governments, and other publicly funded bodies such as national research agencies-- who hold the purse strings that can untie scientific discoveries from a publishing market that is no longer serving the community as well as it could. That is why today the Trust is a leading advocate for enabling free access to research literature through support for new publishing models, such as that of the Public Library of Science, and the establishment of publicly accessible repositories, working in partnership with the United States National Institutes of Health–funded PubMed Central....The first Trust-commissioned study described how scientific research publishing has traditionally worked and why it can be described, in economic terms, as a failing market....This then begs the question of what alternatives there are to this traditional system, now that the Internet has become the researcher's tool of choice for searching and accessing the literature. The second piece of research commissioned by the Trust looked at different business models for research publishing, in order to address this question....This study convinced the Trust that the best way forward to improve access to research findings would be through open access to scientific research articles. This essentially means two things: first, that the copyright holder or holders must grant to the public a free, irrevocable, perpetual license to use, copy, distribute, and make derivative works of their research article, in any medium for any purpose (excepting those that constitute plagiarism or other dishonest acts, of course); and second, that a digital copy must be deposited in an open public archival repository (for example, the US National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central)....For a medical charity like the Trust, I believe it is our duty to actively encourage the most efficient processes available to maximise the likelihood that the research we fund will have the greatest possible health benefit.' Robert Terry is Senior Policy Adviser at the Wellcome Trust.
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.
