Re: BioMed Central announce national Open Access agreement forFinland

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

> Finland is the first country to make a nationwide commitment to support
> Open Access publishing with BioMed Central, it was announced today. All
> universities, polytechnics and research institutes in Finland have become
> BioMed Central members. The membership agreement covers the cost of
> publication, in BioMed Central's 100+ Open Access journals, for all 25000
> publicly funded researchers and teachers in Finland.

Open Access (OA) Journal Publishing is to be encouraged. BioMed Central is
to be encouraged. "Memberships" in Biomed Central -- whether institutional
or national -- are also timely (even though they resemble institutional
site-licenses, even though it is not at all clear how an institution or
country can commit itself in advance on behalf of its researchers to
publish in a particular peer-reviewed journal or journals, or with a
particular publisher or publishers, and even though it is not at all clear
how a publisher or peer-reviewed journal can commit itself in advance to
publishing articles from an institution, country or individual; and even
though it is not clear how this sort of subscription-like membership
arrangement could scale up once there are more OA publishers and OA
journals for institutions or countries to agree to become members of).

This is all well and good, for the sake of accelerating the growth of Open
Access. But if an institutution or country wishes to help accelerate the
growth of Open Access, then besides agreeing to become a "member" of some
or all of the 1000 OA journals out of the total of 24,000 journals that
exist (which will take care of OA for 5% of that institution's or
country's annual research output) would it not also be sensible to agree
to provide OA for the remaining 95% of its research output -- by
self-archiving it?

If Finland wishes "to become the first country to make a (nontrivial)
nationwide commitment to Open Access" it should also commit itself to this:

        http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php

Norway is coming close...

    Norway: Open Online Access to Research
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3172.html
    http://opcit.eprints.org/feb19oa/hauge-norway.doc

Stevan Harnad