Laura Barnett and Hanna Hindstrom, All research to go online, Times Higher Education Supplement, September 23, 2004 (accessible only to subscribers). Excerpt:
Government-funded researchers could be required to post their publications online from next April....Consultation on the RCUK proposals closed last month. RCUK expects to implement the proposals by April 2006, pending agreement with the Office of Science and Technology....Tim Berners-Lee, father of the worldwide web, has expressed his backing for the proposal. Together with representatives of Cambridge, Loughborough, Sheffield and Strathclyde universities, he wrote to Ian Diamond, chair of the RCUK executive group. The letter states: "We believe that the RCUK should go ahead and implement its immediate self-archiving mandate, without delay." Other supporters of open-access publishing claim that there could be significant financial benefits for ordinary researchers, whose citations would rise dramatically as a result of open-access publishing. Stevan Harnad, professor of cognitive science at Southampton University, said that if citations rose by 50 to 250 per cent because of online open-access publishing [PS: he probably said OA archiving, not OA publishing], researchers could gain more than £2.5 million a year in potential salary increases, grants and funding renewals....Adrian Pugh, policy and support manager for the RCUK secretariat, told The Times Higher: "The real issue is making research readily available. We will continue to engage with interested parties --it is still a live topic." He added that the RCUK did not wish to see any curtailment of the potential benefits of onlinle self-archiving, either in terms of revenue and access.
(PS: The draft RCUK policy says that the planned implementation date is October 1, 2005. All of us have heard rumors that the date might be extended until April 2006, but this article is the first public statement of the rumor. The April date has still not been officially confirmed.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 9/23/2005 09:40:00 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.
