Friends: The Prime Minister of Finland has spoken unequivocally in favour of open access. In fact, developing countries should be interested in making all knowledge open access much more than developed countries. Will political leaders, science policy makers and administrators of science and higher education in the developing countries follow the example of the Finnish Prime Minister? Or, even better, if heads of research institutions and vice chancellors of universities take the laed and set up their own institutions' interoperable open access archives - as Indian Institute of Science has done. Best wishes. Arun [Subbiah Arunachalam] ----- Original Message ----- From: "Peter Suber" <peters@earlham.edu> To: <SPARC-OAForum@arl.org>; <boai-forum@ecs.soton.ac.uk> Sent: Wednesday, March 23, 2005 2:01 AM Subject: [BOAI] Finnish Prime Minister on OA
[I thank Kimmo Kuusela, both for pointing out this speech and for the translating this excerpt. --Peter.]
The Prime Minister of Finland, Mr. Matti Vanhanen, has said something positive about open access. From his speech on 12 January (my quick translation):
"One important recommendation concerns the advancement of open access scientific publishing. The goal is that scientific publications will be freely available on the net for citizens and scholars. At the moment the usage and availability of the scientific publications is curtailed by the high subscription fees of printed journals and electronic scientific publications, and also by publishing agreements in which the scholars surrender some of their rights to the publishers. In the name of the progress of science and for the benefit of research it is necessary that the results of the scientific inquiry reach both the academic community and the general public as soon and as easily as possible. I regard this issue especially important also from the point of view of the Information Society Programme of the government."
The speech in Finnish: http://www.valtioneuvosto.fi/vn/liston/base.lsp?r=91325&k=fi&old=1300&rapo=1244