[Oa-italia] [Fwd: [sparc-oaforum] The future of the open access model for research articles]

[Elena Giglia]

Buonasera, in periodo di rinnovi e contrattazioni, mi sembra importante
questo messaggio di Fred Friend che vi giro, e che riprende la mnotizia
gia' diffusa da Juan Carlos De Martin:


Four weeks ago I posted a message to this list expressing concern that the
prospects for a substantial growth in OA content have been damaged by the
renewal of many “big deals”, keeping money in the toll-access market which
could have been used to increase funds available to authors to pay OA
publication charges for publication in OA journals. That concern remains,
but UK hopes for a big increase in OA have been raised by a UK Government
policy statement issued yesterday and available at
http://www.bis.gov.uk/policies/innovation/innovating-for-growth .

The policy statement is about “Innovation and Research Strategy for
Growth”, which is exactly where a commitment to OA belongs. The statement
makes several important commitments:
Para 6.6:  “The Government, in line with our overarching commitment to
transparency and open data, is committed to ensuring that publicly-funded
research should be accessible free of charge.”
Para 6.7: “There are many successful international examples of open access
research. At Harvard, academics often grant the university a non-exclusive
irrevocable right to distribute their scholarly output for non-commercial
use. Their articles are then stored, preserved and made freely available
through the Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard (DASH).”
Para 6.8: “Government will work with partners, including the publishing
industry, to achieve free access to publicly-funded research as soon as
possible and will set an example itself.”
Para 6.9: “The Research Councils expect the researchers they fund to
deposit published articles or conference proceedings in an open access
repository at or around the time of publication. But this practice is
unevenly enforced. Therefore, as an immediate step, we have asked the
Research Councils to ensure the researchers they fund fulfil the current
requirements. Additionally, the Research Councils have now agreed to
invest £2 million in the development, by 2013, of a UK ‘Gateway to
Research’. In the first instance this will allow ready access to Research
Council funded research information and related data but it will be
designed so that it can also include research funded by others in due
course.”

For those of us who witnessed the negative reaction of the previous UK
Government to the 2004 Parliamentary Enquiry, these words are wonderful to
read, and a tribute to the work carried out since 2004 to bring home to
Government the potential benefits of OA to research and education
communities and to the taxpayer. The concern about the funding of OA
publication charges remains, but UK authors and research institutions now
have full Government support for making the results of publicly-funded
research available in repositories.

Fred Friend
Honorary Director Scholarly Communication UCL



-------------- parte successiva --------------
Un allegato HTML è stato rimosso...
URL: <http://liste.cineca.it/pipermail/oa-italia/attachments/20111213/2c25f718/attachment.html>