Fifty-seven of the nation’s leading medical and scientific nonprofit publishers today announced they have offered a proposal to Elias Zerhouni, M.D., director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), that would allow the NIH to bring vast amounts of research findings to the public efficiently and at no cost. In a joint letter to Dr. Zerhouni [PS: probably this letter from October 17], the group detailed a plan that would allow the NIH to provide online access to articles on their journal websites using the existing system of links from abstracts that are indexed on NIH’s Medline. The transparent linking system would make it easier for the public to view more than 1 million research articles and would avert the need to create a new taxpayer-funded publishing infrastructure within the NIH.
(PS: This proposal, which has repeatedly been offered to the NIH and repeatedly rejected, would not let the NIH integrate the article texts with NIH's many OA databases, would undercut the NIH's ability to shorten embargoes and even let publishers lengthen them, and would not guarantee the public continuing free online access to the articles.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/26/2005 08:08:00 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.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
