On 15 Mar 2005, at 12:11, Michael Fraser wrote:
> Just in case it's of interest, the Guardian has a short but effective
> piece on the Scottish Declaration on Open Access
> (http://scurl.ac.uk/WG/OATS/declaration.htm) -- 16 universties
> committed
> to institutional repositories (or a jointly-developed central
> repository)
> and some considering mandating academics to self-archive.
This is very good news indeed!
Derek Law (who is quoted in the article) gave a very rousing talk about
the development and background to the Scottish Declaration at the
recent Berlin-3 conference. His slides and a video of his presentation
are available from the conference website at
http://www.eprints.org/berlin3/program.html . Although the video is
large, I thoroughly recommend waiting for it to download as Derek talks
very convincingly about the emerging rationale behind forming an
institutional and national consensus on Open Access.
The Declaration itself is a somewhat mixed-up document, conflating OA
publishing, OA archiving library economics and the revolution of
scholarly publishing systems, however it ends with a remarkably focused
and effective set of actions directed at funders, institutions and
government.
Institutions (in particular) are enjoined to (a) set up a repository,
(b) encourage AND WHERE PRACTICAL MANDATE researchers to deposit their
output and their students' PhD theses and (c) to review intellectual
property policies to ensure that researchers have the right and duty to
provide open access to their research.
What is particularly notable is that there is no institutional action
relating to publishing in OA journals, despite the fact that OA
publishing is well represented in the text of the declaration and in
the funders' actions. I would be interested to hear the reasons for
this - was it difficult to overcome researchers' reluctance to change
their publishing habits?
---
Les Carr
Received on Wed Mar 16 2005 - 10:40:47 GMT