I just want to mention that at least one funding agency has decided that all (written) products from the funded research must be entered into an eprint archive. This is the Danish Research Centre for Organic Farming, which is a centre without walls that manages the Danish research programme on organic agricultural research.
The arguments for the decision are
a) that all publicly funded research should be publicly accessible,
b) that increased accessibility is expected to increase the communication and impact of the research, and
c) that it provides increased possibilities for coordination, evaluation, and management of the research projects that are funded by the programme.
The only snag in it, with respect to the goal of open access, is that we have had to provide possibilities for restricting access to some documents in order to allow the authors to follow existing copyright conditions. We are at the moment performing an inquiry of publishers submission and copyright policies. More knowledge of the existing policies will allow the authors to go as far as possible towards open access, and this knowledge can also act as a first step towards building a pressure to change those policies. It is difficult to get a response from some of the big publishers, but the preliminary results of the inquiry are available at <
http://orgprints.org/info/inquiry_replies.htm>.
Kind regards
Hugo Alrĝe
Postdoctoral Scientist, Danish Research Centre for Organic Farming - www.darcof.dk
Administrator of the Organic Eprints archive at www.orgprints.org
> -----Oprindelig meddelelse-----
> Fra: Stevan Harnad [mailto:harnad_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk]
> Sendt: 24. juni 2003 16:22
> Til: AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG
> Emne: How Research Funding Agencies Can Promote Open Access
>
>
> On Tue, 24 Jun 2003, Prof Bruce Royan wrote:
>
> > As an occasional lurker on these exchanges, can I ask what
> the role of the
> > Research Councils is, or should be, in all this? They fund
> much of the
> > research which is published, and they have an interest in
> the results of the
> > research they fund being widely disseminated, rather than
> locked up in
> > journals only accessible from institutions that can afford
> to pay (possibly
> > with research council money :-). Is there a role for them
> in building Open
> > Archive services for folk in institutions that are not
> doing this, or
> > portals to the archives that are? Perhaps they are doing
> this already?
>
> The role of the Research Councils should be to ensure that funded
> research is not only published ("publish or perish") but made openly
> accessible to all potential users worldwide. There are two
> ways they can
> help in this regard. One is to mandate institutional self-archiving of
> all refereed research:
Received on Wed Jun 25 2003 - 09:03:48 BST