Robert Kiley, Open access and the Wellcome Trust, He@lth Information on the Internet, August 2005. Kiley is the Head of Systems Strategy for the Wellcome Library at the Wellcome Trust. Excerpt:
The Trust supports the open access model as it meshes with our mission – namely to foster and promote research with the aim of improving human and animal health. We believe that providing free access to the research we fund helps to ensure that this work is applied and built upon. Much of the debate over the past 18 months or so has focused on the costs of moving to an open-access publishing model. In response to this, the Wellcome Trust commissioned some independent research...that concluded that the author-pays [or funder-pays] model offers a viable alternative to subscription journals, and that the dissemination of the results of research is a marginal cost and part of the costs of the research itself....Perhaps [the Wellcome decision] of most significance was the announcement that, from 1 October 2005, all new grant recipients will be required to deposit in PMC, or a UK equivalent, any papers arising from Trust-funded research. This condition will be extended to all existing grant holders from October 2006. All papers deposited with PMC will be made freely available to the public, via the Web, within 6 months of the official date of final publication. Further details about this change to our grant conditions can be found [online]....Ultimately, for the benefits of open access to be fully realised, we need to win over the hearts and minds of those who actually do the research and write the papers – the scientists and researchers. For this group, the key drive behind publishing is a desire for their research to be read and cited. To misquote President Clinton ‘it’s about impact, stupid’. Fortunately for advocates of open access, research1 is starting to show that open-access articles were cited between 50–300% more often than non-open access articles from the same journal and year....The developments announced by the Wellcome Trust over the past couple of months – coupled with the public access initiatives at the US National Institutes of Health and the recent announcement from Research Councils UK (RCUK) in support of open access – all suggest that we are witnessing a sea-change in the way research findings will be disseminated and made accessible in the future.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 8/13/2005 10:05:00 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.
