The following item is from today's Open Access News (Peter Suber)
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2005_05_15_fosblogarchive.html#a111633258230940226
as excerpted from today's Guardian article by Richard Wray.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,3604,1485460,00.html
It sets the stage for the forthcoming and eagerly awaited RCUK announcement
(see 19 April item):
http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/whatsnew.asp
UK leadership in OA
Richard Wray, "Britain a leader in making research available on web,"
The Guardian, May 17, 2005.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,3604,1485460,00.html
EXCERPT: 'Britain is in the vanguard of the drive to make academic
research freely available to anyone over the internet, according to
new research. Creating online archives of research already published
in traditional journals is part of a move towards open access in
academia, a movement backed by scholars and charities including
the Wellcome Trust. While the United States has more open-access
archives - 127 - than any other country and Britain is second with
54, Sweden has the most archives relative to its population. By this
measure, Britain is third and the US is in 10th place. The figures,
compiled by Stevan Harnad, a professor at Southampton University,
and his doctoral student Tim Brody, come as Britain's eight public
research funders prepare to rule on open access. In March, Research
Councils UK (RCUK), which brings together the Economic and Social
Research Council, the Medical Research Council and six others on
policy issues, consulted university heads on the potential impact
of open access. Its position is expected to be made public within
days and proponents of open access hope that RCUK will follow the
lead of Scottish universities and research funders by giving a major
boost to open-access archives. Earlier this year, all Scotland's
universities pledged to set up online research libraries. Research
funders, it recommended, should make it a condition of grants
that any articles produced through funded research should be made
freely available on the internet. The Scottish move is similar to
recommendations made by MPs on the science and technology select
committee last year. The government, however, largely ignored the
advice. Despite this apparent setback, moves to make British research
more widely available continue. This month some of Britain's leading
medical research funders, including Wellcome and the British Heart
Foundation, got together to finance the country's most comprehensive
online repository of medical knowledge, UK PubMed Central. Efforts
by French and Dutch research institutions
have created similar online archives.'
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2005_05_15_fosblogarchive.html#a111633258230940226
The Guardian article compressed the rank order to 10 (from the original 12),
Probably in order to make it come out more dramatically, with the US
10th. This was done by collapsing a tie -- Belgium & Portugal -- into a
single rank. If the Finland and Denmark tie were collapsed too, then the US
would have been (a less dramatic) ninth, but Hungary would have been
10th. That is in a sense more dramatic, because Hungary is the only non
"mainstream" country in the top 10/12:
(1) Sweden
(2) Netherlands
(3) UK
(4) Canada
(5) Australia
(6) Finland (6) Denmark (tied)
(7) Belgium (7) Portugal (tied)
(8) Germany
(9) US
(10) Hungary
There was also an important follow-up posting by Jan Velterop, re-ordering
the weights by number of universities rather than raw population size,
which gave roughly the same rank order, but with a few rank swaps (*
were assuming BE figures for the small euro countries):
SW* NL UK FIn* DMK* HUN GERM CAN AUS BEL POrt BRAZ FR USA ITAL SoAfR SP IND JAP
That also corrects somewhat for Arthur Sale's valid posting in which he
obesrved that the archiving is anglo(language)-centric: True, but so is
the research journal literature (and ISI coverage), owing to the McNopoly
that that tongue currently holds worldwide. OA itself should help widen
and diversify if not entirely level the linguistic playing field.!
Stevan Harnad
Received on Tue May 17 2005 - 14:19:08 BST