Date: Tue, 23 Mar 2004 09:47:01 +0530
From: Subbiah Arunachalam
India is again excluded as was done earlier with HINARI and AGORA!
Arun
For immediate release
�
Contact:
Melissa Hageman, Open Society Institute: (212) 548-0142
MHagemann@sorosny.org�
Helen Doyle, Public Library of Science: (415) 624-1217
hdoyle @plos.org
�
Academic publishing made more accessible
for scientists in developing world
New Open Society Institute Grants Program Will Promote Open Access
Publishing
March 22, 2004 New York, NY & San Francisco, CA� The Open Society
Institute (OSI) and Public Library of Science (PLoS) today announced a
new grants program to support open access publishing in developing and
transition countries. The grants will make it much easier for scientists
based in developing and transition countries to submit articles to the
premiere peer-reviewed research journals published by PLoS.
"Scientists in poorer countries have been virtually excluded from the
journal publishing world," said Darius Cuplinskas, director of OSI's
Information Program. "Open access journals will remove barriers and make
these scientists full members of the international scientific community.
PLoS is a non-profit advocacy organization and a publisher of
open-access journals, which are available free of charge online and are
subsidized largely by author-side charges for publication. While this
pay-to-publish system allows PLoS to make scientific and medical
literature immediately accessible to anyone in the world with an
Internet connection, many authors from developing countries cannot
afford the fees. Now, scientists affiliated with the OSI-funded member
institutions will be entitled to a waiver of publication charges for
their articles in PLoS journals.
OSI's Information Program has been a strong supporter of the open access
movement. Its Budapest Open Access Initiative, launched in 2002,
advocates for the support of two parallel strategies for the adoption of
open access:� self-archiving and open access journals.
The OSI/PLoS Institutional Membership grants will target developing and
transition countries.� Authors from the least developed countries will
receive a waiver of publication charge upon request, a policy PLoS has
had in place since the launch of its first journal, PLoS Biology, in
October 2003.� To ensure that ability to pay publication charges does
not influence the review process, PLoS has a firewall in place to shield
requests from all editors and reviewers.
The debate about open access has shifted recently, said Dr. Helen Doyle,
PLoS director of development and strategic alliances. Doubts about its
value have been replaced with doubts about its viability. This
commitment from OSI answers the question of how scientists in developing
countries will be able to publish in our journals on a large scale.
The complete list of countries and regions where institutions are
eligible for the new memberships is as follows:
Albania
Armenia
Azerbaijan
Belarus
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Botswana
Bulgaria
Cameroon
Cote d'Ivoire
Croatia
Czech Republic
Estonia
Georgia
Ghana
Guatemala
Hungary
Indonesia
Kazakhstan
Kosovo
Kyrgyzstan
Laos
Latvia� Lithuania
Macedonia
Moldova
Mongolia
Namibia
Nigeria
Peru
Poland
Romania
Russia
Serbia and Montenegro
Slovakia
South Africa
Swaziland
Tajikistan
Thailand
Turkey
Ukraine
Uzbekistan
Vietnam
Zimbabwe�����
More information about the grants is available at
http://www.soros.org/openaccess/grants.shtml . The joint OSI-PLoS
announcement follows the January launch of the PLoS Institutional
Membership program. More information about the PLoS Membership Program
is available at http://www.plos.org/support.
