Digital Rights Network

From EDRI-GRAM
http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number4.8/openaccess:

The EU report drafted by economists from Toulouse University and the Free University of Brussels on the economic and technical evolution of scientific publishing in Europe, published on 31 March 2006, recommends public access to scientific research funded by the European taxpayer.

The report proposes the development of a European policy that would allow researchers receiving EU funding to place copies of articles published in subscription journals on web-based archives that can be accessed by everyone for free. It also expressed the need to “specify standards that will insure that the archives are accessible, interoperable, and have cross-searching facilities. In addition, set up a general European archive for researchers with access to a subject-based or institutional archive.”

On January 23-24, 2006, Intelligent Television hosted the Economics of Open Content symposium at MIT to bring together representatives from media industries, cultural and educational institutions, and legal and business minds to discuss how to make open content happen better and faster.

They've now released the whole set of the presentations under a CC attribution license including Terry Fisher on 'The Economics of the Music Industry' and Eric von Hippel on 'New Models of Creative Production in the Digital Age'.

Richard Smith ex-editor of the BMJ and famous for quitting his post at Nottingham University after it received funding from the Tobacco industry, recently called for an 'insurrection' among academic authors and editors against closed publishing and a move to an open access model. Smith who was a long-time editor of the BMJ joined the board of the Public Library of Science (PLoS) last year. PLoS is a prominent non-profit organization of scientists and physicians creating dedicated to open-access publishing and making the world's scientific and medical literature a public resource. Below you can find excerpts from a letter (full version) he sent out.

6 January, 2005. JISC announces the winners of funding under the second round of its Open Access programme. The decision has been made to award five publishers funds to support open access delivery for their journals.

These journals are: The New Journal of Physics (published by the Institute of Physics Publishing); Nucleic Acids Research (Oxford University Press); Journal of Medical Genetics (BMJ Publishing Group Ltd); the journals of the International Union of Crystallography (IUCr); and The Journal of Experimental Botany (The Society for Experimental Biology)

JISC funding will ensure the waiving of all or part of the submission/ publication fees for all UK HE authors.