[LIS-Forum] Need for focused advocacy to promote OA

[Subbiah Arunachalam]

Friends:

Here is an item from Peter Suber's blog. Despite so much being written
about open access, a very large proportion of researchers is not aware of
it even in an advanced country like Germany. please read on.

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Spreading the word about OA


Richard Seitmann, "Open access" is practically unknown among scientists as
an alternative for publications, Heise Online, May 24, 2005. Excerpt: 'The
secretary-general of the conference of deans of higher education (HRK),
Christiane Ebel-Gabriel, explained today at the opening of the symposium
with the title " The Future of Scientific Communication -- Open Access",
which will be taking place today and tomorrow in Göttingen, that directors
of institutions of higher education will have to "see ensuring access to
scientific publications and research results as a strategic task much more
than they currently do." Two years ago, the HRK called for a refocus of
scientific publications and information exchanges in light of the crisis
among journals at the time because skyrocketing subscription prices both
for conventional and electronic scientific journals had been leading
people to cancel their subscriptions, paradoxically making access to
published research results even harder despite the Internet. "The
financial pressure on the field of science continues to grow,"
Ebel-Gabriel explained. She regretted that the current alternatives for
publication in "open access" journals and on institute servers have not
been used to the full. The secretary-general quoted figures from a still
unpublished study (PowerPoint file) by the German Research Society, which
found that three of four scientists surveyed and more than 85% of social
scientists and professors of the humanities are not aware that open access
is one possibility for publication.'

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So what is needed is focused advocacy and awareness campaigns. And some
real action on the ground - I mean setting up open access archives and
filling them with papers!

Arun
[Subbiah Arunachalam]