... In recent years, many countries have implemented legislative mandates that require researchers who accept public grants to make their published research results freely available online within a reasonable time period. While Canada has lagged, a growing number of funding agencies, including the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Canadian Cancer Society, and Genome Canada have adopted open access policies. ...
Notwithstanding the success stories, my weekly technology law column (Toronto Star version, homepage version) argues that two major barriers remain.
The first is the need for broader campus support for open access. In recent months, many of the world’s top universities - including Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and Cornell - have adopted open access strategies that feature mandatory open access policies within some faculties as well as financial support to absorb costs faced by researchers who wish to publish in open access journals.
Canadian universities may benefit from far more public funding than their U.S. counterparts, but they have been much more reluctant to adopt open access mandates. While there are some exceptions - Athabasca University along with the library departments at York University and the University of Calgary have adopted open access policies - most have been strangely silent on the issue.
Second, Canadian university publishers have been generally hostile toward open access. Leading university presses such as Oxford University Press and Yale University Press have experimented with open licences, but most Canadian presses have not.
This is particularly troubling given the public dollars that support university publishers. ...
Posted by
Gavin Baker at 10/20/2009 04:39:00 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.
