Succinct intro to OA, esp. OA archiving Stevan Harnad and the Southampton Eprints team have launched an open access page, explaining the basics and linking to key resources. Excerpt: Putting Open Access into Practice: Researchers, their institutions and their funders need to be informed of the benefits of providing Open Access and instructed on how quickly and simply it is done. Institutional Open Access Repositories need to be created (and registered, so as to be seen and emulated by other institutions). Most important, an OA self-archiving policy for systematically filling these repositories with their target content needs to be adopted and implemented (and registered, so as to be seen and emulated by other institutions). An Institutional Repository is the best way to provide OA to research output. Software such as EPrints provides a web-based OAI-compliant IR for free. --- More on the Global Information Commons for Science David Dickson, Global project seeks to promote access to science, SciDev.Net, November 17, 2005. A leading international scientific organisation has launched a global initiative to develop ways of increasing access to knowledge produced by publicly funded research. The Global Information Commons for Science Initiative seeks to remove restrictions to accessing information that technological advances and new ways of protecting intellectual property have created. The International Council for Science's (ICSU) Committee on Data for Science and Technology (CODATA) launched the initiative on 14 November in Tunis, Tunisia....According to CODATA, their approach seeks a "collaborative, consensual solution" to the conflict between the advantages of protecting commercial scientific data, and the economic and social costs such protection imposes on scientific enterprise. It has three specific goals. Firstly, to make people more aware of the benefits that easy access and use of scientific information will bring to society. Second, to promote the wide adoption of effective ways of increasing the availability and use of publicly funded research findings. And finally, to encourage and coordinate members of the global scientific community who are already trying to achieve the first two objectives, "particularly in developing countries"....Among the most prominent supporters of the new initiative is John Sulston, winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize for physiology and medicine, and a key leader of the international human genome sequencing project. Addressing the Paris meeting, Sulston said that some people are trying hard to confine knowledge, and that new barriers to communication are forming at the very time that common access to information is most needed. "This culture impedes research and innovation, throttles ethical decision-making, widens the gap between rich and poor, and contributes to global insecurity," said Sulston.