Date: Wed, 3 May 2006 03:23:15 +0530 (IST) From: arun@mssrf.res.in
From Peter Suber's blog
EURASIP President on OA Sergios Theodoridis, Presidents 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 EURASIPs 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 NSFs 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 Germanys 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....