Why is this initiative just one for the biomedical community? It seems
strange to me, that it doesn't cover science in general. For example, one of
the major problems in Conservation Biology is in fact access to the widely
scattered publications, and increasingly, a digital divide is being widening
between North and South (where most of the biodiversity is), as well as
between those being part of a wealthy university system and those not.
Donat Agosti
[Moderator's Note: A simple way to extend the scope of the US/NIH
initiative (to mandate the open-access self-archiving of all
NIH-funded biomedical research) so as to cover all of scientific and
scholarly research is to drop the stipulation that the self-archiving
must be done in PubMed Central (PMC): Just mandate that it should
be self-archived in an OAI-compliant archive, without stipulating
PMC, just as the UK's proposed self-archiving mandate has done. If
NIH authors self-archive in their own institutional OAI archives,
the practise will propagate naturally across all the disciplines at
their institutions. -- Stevan Harnad]
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/39903.htm
http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-04-064.html
Received on Thu Sep 09 2004 - 14:17:19 BST