Petition for Public Access
Open up!
The open access movement argues that Publicly-funded research should be made publicly accessible. Sounds logical, doesn't it? Yes, says a last year's study of the European Commission. By signing an Internet petition for guaranteed public access you can now urge decision-makers to eventually put this awareness into action, reports Brynja Aadam-Radmanic.
(Feb 23rd 2007) As a scientist you have some vital interests concerning publication. Firstly, you want to publish your results in the most prestigious journals. Secondly, you'd like your papers to be available to all - at least to every colleague that may cite your work. Unfortunately, these two interests tend to compete with each other, when publishers of traditional prestigious journals enter the game. They use their market power to drive up the price, thereby limiting access to your papers. And, as a scientist, you are between the devil and the deep blue sea.
There are two ways out of this dilemma. Either you publish in open access journals, or you are insistent on your right to self-archive the papers you published in traditional journals. However, although many researchers feel uncomfortable with this dilemma, they don't want to change their publication habits, nor do they feel in the right bargaining position to make demands.
Fortunately, there is "someone" in a much better position to make demands than single researchers are, namely, the community that is funding research. After all, the free flow of knowledge is considered to be essential for scientific progress and therefore economically important for "maximising societal returns on R&D investments", as pointed out in a study published in January 2006 by the Directorate-General for Research at the European Commission.
How could and should politics foster the availability of research results, without harming the basically effective scholarly publication system? After an extensive market analysis the authors of the EC-study came to the conclusion that publishers of scientific literature can be forced to serve public interest to a greater extent without endangering their business model.
An Internet petition project is now - one year after publication of the EC-study - collecting digital signatures from researchers and librarians around the world urging the EC to walk the talk, endorsing the recommendations of the study and making sure the market for scholarly publications is sufficiently competitive and "dissemination-friendly". Today, the list of signatures reads as the
Who is Who of research.
The petition places special emphasis on endorsing Recommendation A1 of the study, which expresses the need to make research results freely available shortly after publication. As research-funding agencies have a central role in determining researchers' publishing practices, the study advocates that public access be made a prerequisite of public funding. It recommends, "Following the lead of the NIH and other institutions, the research funding agencies should promote and support the archiving of publications in open repositories."
The EC-study last year had left the time period open to discussion, after which public access should become mandatory. In accordance with the recent recommendations from the European Research Advisory Board and the statement of the European Research Council on Open Access, the petition now says, "any potential 'embargo' on free access should be set at no more than six months following publication."
If you support these claims, you should sign now. The petition is to be presented to the European Commission in Brussels at its conference on "Scientific Publishing in the European Research Area: Access, Dissemination and Preservation in the Digital Age" as a display of support by the research community.
Study on the Economic and Technical Evolution of the Scientific Publication Markets of Europe (from the Directorate-General for Research at the European Commission)
http://ec.europa.eu/research/science-society/pdf/scientific-publication-study_en.pdf
Petition for guaranteed public access to publicly-funded research results
http://www.ec-petition.eu/index.php?p=index
