Draft report from Australian government recommends OA mandate (fwd)

[Stevan Harnad <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk>]

         From Peter Suber's Open Access News
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2006_11_12_fosblogarchive.html#116344467230316048

     Draft report from Australian government recommends OA mandate

 	The Australian Government Productivity Commission has
 	released an important study, Public Support for Science
 	and Innovation: Draft Research Report (November 2,
 	2006).	(Thanks to Colin Steele.)
 	http://www.pc.gov.au/study/science/draftreport/index.html

     Excerpt:

     Impediments to the functioning of the innovation system [:]....There
     is scope for the ARC and the NHMRC to play a more active role than
     they currently do in promoting access to the results of research
     they fund. They could require as a condition of funding that research
     papers, data and other information produced as a result of
     their funding are made publicly available such as in an "open
     access" repository.

     The Australian Government has sought to enhance access to the results
     of publicly funded research through the:

     - development of an Accessibility Framework for Publicly Funded
     Research; and

     - allocation of funding under the Systemic Infrastructure Initiative
     to build technical information infrastructure that supports the
     creation, dissemination of and access to knowledge, and the use of
     digital assets and their management (box 5.10)....

     In a recent report to DEST, Houghton et al. (2006) estimated net
     gains from improving access to publicly-funded research across the
     board and in particular research sectors (table 5.2).
http://www.dest.gov.au/NR/rdonlyres/0ACB271F-EA7D-4FAF-B3F7-0381F441B175/13935/DEST_Research_Communications_Cost_Report_Sept2006.pdf

     - The estimated benefits from an assumed 5 per cent increase in access
     and efficiency and level of social rate of return were between $2
     million (ARC competitively-funded research) and $628 million (gross
     expenditure on R&D).

     - Assuming a move from this level of improved access and efficiency
     to a national system of institutional repositories in Australia over
     twenty years, the estimated benefit/cost ratios were between 3.1
     (NHMRC-funded research) to 214 (gross expenditure on R&D)....

     Of interest, is whether funding agencies themselves could become
     more actively involved in enhancing access to the results of the
     research they fund....

     In their recent report to DEST, Houghton et al. (2006)
     http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/120-guid.html
     made a number of suggestions to improve access to and dissemination
     of research including:

     - developing a national system of institutional or enterprise-based
     repositories to support new modes of enquiry and research; ...

     - ensuring that the Research Quality Framework supports and encourages
     the development of new, more open scholarly communication
     mechanisms, rather than encouraging "a retreat" by researchers
     to conventional publication forms and media, and a reliance by
     evaluators upon traditional publication metrics (for example, by
     ensuring dissemination and impact are an integral part of evaluation);

     - encouraging funding agencies (for example, ARC and NHMRC) to mandate
     that the results of their supported research be made available in
     open access archives and repositories;

     - encouraging universities and research institutions to support the
     development of new, more open scholarly communication mechanisms,
     through, for example, the development of "hard or soft open access"
     mandates for their supported research; and

     - providing support for a structured advocacy program to raise
     awareness and inform all stakeholders about the potential benefits
     of more open scholarly communication alternatives, and provide
     leadership in such areas as copyright (for example, by encouraging
     use of "creative commons" licensing) (pp. xii-xiii)....

     Several impediments to innovation should be addressed: ...

     - published papers and data from ARC and NHMRC-funded projects should
     be freely and publicly available....

     ---

     Comment [from Peter Suber]: It's important that this report was
     written by a government commission and important that it recommends
     an OA mandate.

     From the file of preliminaries:

         You are invited to examine this draft research study and to
         provide written submissions to the Commission. Submissions should
         reach the Commission by Thursday, 21 December 2006.  In addition,
         the Commission intends to hold a limited number of consultations
         to obtain feedback on this draft.

         The Commission intends to present its final report to the
         Government in early March 2007.

     The Productivity Commission gives no address (and worse, no email
     address) specifically for comments, but it does give this contact
     info for its Media and Publications division:

             Locked Bag,
             2 Collins Street
             East Melbourne VIC 8003
             Fax: (03) 9653 2303
             Email: maps@pc.gov.au

     [Peter Suber, Open Access News]
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2006_11_12_fosblogarchive.html#116344467230316048