Date: Wed, 21 Jul 2004 11:03:49 +0530
From: Madhuresh
This news item, appeared in The Scientist
(http://www.biomedcentral.com/news/20040720/04), may be of your
interest.
Madhuresh
UK committee backs open access
Politicians urge the government to insist on free archiving of
scientific papers | mailto:stephen@thescientisteurope.com By Stephen
Pincock
LONDON-Britain should insist that government-funded researchers deposit
a copy of their scientific papers in an electronic archive that can be
accessed for free online, an influential committee of politicians said
Tuesday (July 20).
The House of Commons Science and Technology Committee
<http://www.parliament.uk/parliamentary_committees/science_and_technolog
y_committee.cfm> has been investigating
http://www.biomedcentral.com/news/20040310/05/ science publishing
most of this year. Its deliberations drew on an ongoing debate over
"open access" to research, whose advocates say that the output from
scientific research should be available free of charge.
"We have recommended that the UK government fund the establishment of an
interlinked network of institutional repositories on which all research
articles originating in the UK should be deposited and can be read for
free," the committee's report, released today, states. "In order to
ensure that the repositories are well populated, we have recommended
that research councils mandate their funded researchers to deposit
copies of all their articles in this way."
The committee suggests that the government should appoint a central body
to oversee the implementation of repositories and help with their
setting up. The UK government has to respond to the committee's report
and is expected to do so within 2 months.
A spokesperson for the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research
Council (BBSRC) told The Scientist that the council wants to encourage
data to be available as readily as possible, while ensuring that the
quality of scientific publications is maintained.
"BBSRC is working with its sister research councils under the
coordination of Research Councils UK http://www.rcuk.ac.uk (RCUK) to
continue to develop our policy for addressing the needs of this rapidly
evolving area," the spokesperson said.
The members of the committee stop short giving their full support to
open-access publishing, in which the author pays to publish instead of
the reader paying a fee for access. The United Kingdom has too little
experience of this model to know what effect it would have, the
politicians said. Nevertheless, they recommended that the research
councils make funds available so researchers can publish in such
journals if they want.
Jan Velterop, publisher of BioMedCentral, a for-profit publisher of
open-access journals, called the report an important milestone in the
open-access movement. (BioMedCentral is a partner with The Scientist.)
"The overall report... is really a ringing endorsement of the whole
concept of open access to scientific material," Velterop said. "It
definitely is a major development. I even think that with hindsight, we
may look back on this as a turning point."
Peter Suber, an open-access
http://www.biomedcentral.com/news/20040427/05/ advocate at Earlham
College in Richmond, Ind., said he was delighted that the report
"doesn't merely endorse open access, but calls for a national commitment
to open access-encompassing all UK higher education institutions, the
British Library, the research councils, the government funding agencies,
and government policymakers."=20
"The report recommends many steps, but properly focuses on the one step
that will do the most good: asking government funding agencies to put an
open-access condition on research grants and requiring grantees to
deposit the full-text articles based on funded research in open-access
repositories," Suber told The Scientist.
Most scientific research is currently published in journals that charge
for access, although many allow their authors to self-archive papers. In
June, Elsevier
<http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/authored_newsitem.cws_home/companynews
05_00145> , one of the biggest science publishers, made this move.=20
But this week, Arie Jongejan, chief executive officer of Science and
Technology for Elsevier, said some of the concerns expressed in the
report about government policy were overstated. "We are doubtful that
the government will necessarily agree to recommendations made by the
report," he said.
The committee also urged the United Kingdom to take an international
role as a proponent for change in scientific publishing. In response,
Graham Taylor, director of Academic Publishing at the Publishers
Association, said the UK industry was already a center of excellence for
scientific publishing. "We look forward to engaging with government and
its agencies on the issues that the committee has raised in order to
ensure an efficient and sustainable strategy for the future," he said.
Just last week, the US House of Representatives Appropriations Committee
also recommended that the National Institutes for Health (NIH) make
research it funds freely available.
In a report, the committee called on NIH to offer access to authors'
final manuscripts and supplemental materials via
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/ PubMed Central 6 months after
publication. If the grantee used NIH funds to pay any publication
charges, free access would be immediate.
Taken together, these political recommendations suggest an international
consensus is growing in support of open access, said Michael B. Eisen,
cofounder of open-access publisher Public Library of Science.=20
"The report from the House of Commons committee and the bill passed by
the US House committee are a call to action. Both have made clear the
need for better access to publicly funded scientific works, and both
have offered concrete mechanisms for achieving it," Eisen said in a
statement.
Links for this article
Science and Technology Committee
http://www.parliament.uk/parliamentary_committees/science_and_t
<http://www.parliament.uk/parliamentary_committees/science_and_technolog
y_committee.cfm> echnology_committee.cfm=20
C. Brahic, "UK hears open access evidence," The Scientist, March 10,
2004.
http://www.biomedcentral.com/news/20040310/05/=20
Research Councils UK
http://www.rcuk.ac.uk=20
A. McCook, "Open-access journals rank well," The Scientist, April 27,
2004.
http://www.biomedcentral.com/news/20040427/05/=20
"Elsevier further liberalizes copyright for authors," Elsevier company
news, June 3, 2004.
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/authored_newsitem.cws_home/com
<http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/authored_newsitem.cws_home/companynews
05_00145> panynews05_00145=20
PubMed Central
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/=20
=20
Madhuresh Singhal
Aurigene Discovery Technologies Limited,
Electronic City, phase II, Hosur Road,
Bangalore 560100
Phone 28521314-16 Ext.- 422
Mobile 98861 82822
E-mail: madhureshsinghal@yahoo.com=20
http://nettalk2.tripod.com/=20
