Re: UK article on Open Access

[Heather Morrison <heatherm@eln.bc.ca>]

Open Access is a worldwide phenomenon, and happening on many fronts.  A
temporary setback to one approach, in one country, means little.

Discussion about OA tends to be intense and often focusses on the details
of implementation lately - it's hard to keep up, and even hard to pick out
some of the major OA friendly initiatives that are happening.

Here are a few of the major OA events - from this past week, from Peter
Suber's excellent blog:

Austrian Conference of Rectors sign the Berlin Declaration on Open Access
to Knowledge, as have 31 of 77 Italian universities (Messina Declaration)
All research institutions in Denmark join BMC (BioMedCentral)
The Council of the Institute of Mathematical Studies has decided to
deposit all the articles from its 4 journals in arXiv
The Wellcome Trust has joined the NIH in calling for deposit of articles
for all the research it funds in a central archive within 7 months from
publication

Note:  this is only a partial list of the OA friendly announcements of the
past week. from:  Open Access News
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html

Some OA stats:

An OAIster search now encompasses more than 3.7 million items  
http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister/

The Directory of Open Access Journals now lists 1,357 journals - 39 
titles have been added in the last 30 days http://www.doaj.org/

Awareness of OA is just beginning to grow.

Open Access is a hot topic at many conferences this year - including many
conferences where the focus is how to set up institutional repositories
and/or e-prints archives.  For many locations, societies, etc., OA will be
a topic for a conference next year.

Some recent or upcoming examples of conferences with a focus on OA:
Pretoria July 2004 http://isis.sabinet.co.za/dspace/handle/123456789/38
India - Journal of Postgraduate Medicine Gold Con September 2004  
http://www.jpgmonline.com/gc_pdetails4.asp
Canada - Institutional Repositories:  the Future is Now!  October 2004 
http://www.carl-abrc.ca/frames_index.htm
Kiev, Ukraine  Dec. 2004 http://www.irf.kiev.ua/en/anns?doc:int

Not that anyone expected or predicted a tsunammi, nor (in my opinion)  is
speed essential, as long as OA is the destination.

cheers,

Heather Morrison

> Joe Esposito wrote:
> An article just appeared in Information World, whose headline reads:
> "Open access publishing on the decline?  Government response to 
> Committee findings points to decline of open access movement as a 
> significant reason for staying with the status quo"  The URL is:
> http://www.iwr.co.uk/IWR/1159363, though I had some trouble loading 
> the page at first.
>
> I think the article has it right:  For the short-term, OA has peaked.
> The "great tsunamai" that people are talking about hasn't happened--and
> won't, at least not yet.  But longer term the pieces are being put in
> place that will make OA more and more common.  The article does not
> address the long term.  I am thinking in particular of the "leakage" 
> from proprietary journals through email attachments, author 
> self-archiving, and institutional archives.  Something like DSpace, 
> which makes it very easy for an author to do exactly what Stevan Harnad 
> wants him or her to do, is probably going to play a very large role in 
> raising the flow from leakage to a steady stream, and visitors to the 
> Grand Canyon know what a steady stream can do when given enough time.
> --
> Joe Esposito