The Government’s 2004 Backing Australia’s Ability package included the proposal to
develop an Accessibility Framework to improve access to research information,
outputs and infrastructure. The Government is keen to ensure that, through the
establishment and linkage of electronic digital repositories, national scholarly
output and research data derived from Australian Government funding will be
available to researchers and the wider community....To date, the Government has provided $33.7 million in funding from the Systematic
Infrastructure Initiative (SII) for projects to build the technical information
infrastructure to support the creation, dissemination of and access to knowledge,
the use of digital assets and their management. These projects have been
recommended to the Minister by the Australian Research Information Infrastructure
Committee (ARIIC). Four of these projects are working on the development of open
access institutional repositories....
Enhanced open access approaches will certainly
facilitate the sharing of knowledge between researchers and will provide the
possibility of greater access for non-academic users of knowledge. Our desktop
research, however, suggests that effective knowledge transfer usually requires the
intervention of knowledge intermediaries who are able to translate and
contextualise academic knowledge to make it ‘useable’ by non-academic
communities....
While it is appropriate for public policy to ensure that the return on public
investment in research and higher education is realised through effective
knowledge transfer, there are also acknowledged tensions between the push to
commercialise knowledge generated through publicly funded research and the
increasing emphasis being given to open access and open innovation. It was argued by some stakeholders consulted for this project that the current public
policy emphasis on research commercialisation encourages institutions to place a
narrow interpretation on what constitutes knowledge transfer, and that knowledge
was at risk of being ‘locked away’ rather than transferred for wider application....Public policy needs to walk a fine line between creating incentives for exploiting
knowledge with potential commercial value and facilitating the wide uptake of
knowledge for national benefit.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/16/2006 09:19:00 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.
