The time is right to move towards open access, said Director General of CERN Dr Robert Aymar at the opening of the two day JISC conference held in Oxford this week. While new technologies have made it possible for authors to reach readers directly, publishers should work to position themselves as more flexible guarantors of quality in the digital age.
Outlining the work of CERN’s Task Force on Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics, which published its report in June, Dr Aymar spoke of the three-year transition programme detailed in the report which is establishing open access models of publishing research outputs in particle physics journals.
Publishers, he reported, have been ‘generally positive’ in their response to the report and the transition programme which has had the effect, he said, of increasing the returns on research funding in particle physics....
Earlier Dr Malcolm Read, JISC Executive Secretary, had welcomed more than two hundred delegates to the conference, including many from abroad, saying that the idea that the fruits of publicly funded research should be made openly available was ‘a massively important and powerful vision.’ The demands of data-led research are a significant factor, he suggested, in the need to explore ways of overcoming cultural and technical barriers to open access.
Later Robert Terry of the Wellcome Trust, which funds researchers in bio-medicine, spoke of the trust’s mandate which means that from next week (1 October) researchers in receipt of research grants from the Wellcome Trust will be required to deposit their articles in UK PubMed Central, the UK version of the open access repository for the medical sciences. Open access, he said, ‘is about improving research’, not about reforming the publishing industry.
Publishers themselves were strongly represented at the conference ...[including] Martin Richardson of OUP Journals...[and] Martin Blume, editor in chief of the journals of the American Physical Society....
Keynote speaker Professor John Houghton, from Victoria University, Melbourne, presented an analysis of some of the wider benefits of opening up access to research outputs. There are, he suggested, strong economic reasons for exploring and implementing more open models of scholarly communications. Another keynote speaker, Johannes Fournier, of German research body DFG, spoke of developments in Germany and in particular of some of the attempts to overcome the cultural barriers that hamper the growth of institutional repositories in Germany....
A full report on the two-day conference is being prepared. More details to follow shortly.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/09/2006 12:15:00 PM.
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.
