[LIS-Forum] Why OA makes sense

[Mailing List Manager]

Date: Wed, 3 May 2006 03:23:15 +0530 (IST)
From: arun at mssrf.res.in

>From Peter Suber's blog


EURASIP President on OA
Sergios Theodoridis, President’s Message, EURASIP, March 2006. Theodoridis
is the President of European Association for Signal, Speech, and Image
Processing (EURASIP), which publishes four OA journals through Hindawi
Publishing. Excerpt:

    Since EURASIP’s major decision to adopt the Open Access (OA) model for
all its new journals, I have developed an interest in trying to keep
up with related publications and adopted policies and actions by
various scientific organizations and bodies concerning the OA
philosophy....In a world of an unprecedented complexity, information
and knowledge access models that transcend professional
classifications, national boundaries, and social barriers are timely
and necessary. The OA philosophy affects not only the publication of
scientific research, but also the way large databases, such as the
genomes of animals and plants, can be accessed.

    Recently, the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) released version
5.0 of the NSF’s Cyberinfrastructure Vision for the 21st century. The
report states that 30 nations, including the United States, declared
their commitment to work together towards the establishment of common
access regimes for research data generated through public funding.
Currently Germany’s Max-Planck Society, the UK Wellcome Trust, the
French CNRS, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute all encourage
their funded researchers to make their peer-reviewed articles publicly
available. It is worth pointing out that the UK House of Commons
Science and Technology Committee considered the OA issue and the
report was in favor of open access....

    Concerning publications, there are two major motivations in favor of
open access. The first refers to ethics. Research funded by the public
should be available to the public. The second motivation refers to the
research impact. Internet technology and powerful search engines make
it possible to mine any publications of interest that reside in an
open access repository. This will no doubt increase the impact and the
citation of published articles. Furthermore, the OA model complies
with the above-mentioned synergy and cooperation rationale, since it
is a way of minimizing the gap between scientists living and working
in the developed countries and those who are working in less developed
countries and have very limited accessibility to published results....