Outcome of Berlin 3 at Southampton UK

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

On Tue, 1 Mar 2005, Gretchen Vogel wrote:

> Dear Dr. Harnad,
> 
> I've been following the program for the Open Access meeting yesterday
> and today. I also spoke with Georg Botz on Friday about his expectations
> for the meeting. I'm wondering if you might have a few minutes this
> afternoon to discuss any decisions that were reached today. We would
> like to run a brief update on the meeting's results in this Friday's
> issue of Science. Unfortunately, my deadline is tight: my story needs to
> be finished this evening by 6 pm, your time. Could you please let me
> know if there's a way I can reach you by phone this afternoon? Many
> thanks for your time.
> 
> Best regards,
> Gretchen Vogel 
> 
> *********************************************
> Gretchen Vogel, Berlin correspondent
> Science

Dear Gretchen,

Pity I didn't get this in time. The outcome was (surprisingly) good!  
Until now, the Berlin Declaration was just an abstract expression of
principle. The institutions who signed declared they were "for" Open
Access -- but without any indication of what might be done practically to
*provide* Open Access.

This meeting was meant to formulate a practical policy that institutions
can adopt to *implement* the Berlin Declaration, and the policy is simple,
and almost exactly identical to the recommendation of the UK Select
Committee (which was *rejected* by the UK government!):

(1) Institutions who commit themselves to implementing the Berlin
Declaration will adopt it as a policy that all their researchers must
place all their published research articles in their own institutional
open access repository.

(Several institutions that have already adopted this policy have said that
the way they implement it is that their researchers must deposit the
metadata and the full text, otherwise they will be "invisible" for
research assessment: The institutional repository will be the data on
which their performance assessment and the institution's own
record-keeping of its own research output will be based.)

This is almost is *exactly* what the UK Select Committee recommended:

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/39903.htm

(2) Apart from *requiring* the above, the implementation policy
*encourages* publishing in an Open Access Journal *if a suitable one
exists.* (This is not, and cannot be, a requirement, as authors must be
allowed to select their own journals, and only 5% of journals are Open
Access Journals.)

The outcome is important for 4 reasons:

(a) It gives the signers of the Berlin Declaration a clear direction as to
what should be done to implement the Berlin Declaration, concretely and
practically speaking.

(b) It provides the world with an alternative to the recent NIH-12 policy
(which merely encourages NIH fundees to self-archive in NIH's central
repository, Pub Med Central, within 12 months of publication -- instead of
*requiring* them to self-archive *immediately* in their own institutional
repository.

(c) It is very likely now to be adopted widely (and has already been
adopted de facto by a number of the participants in this meeting,
including the huge national research network of France, the CNRS, its
counterpart in Germany, the Max-Planck- Institutes, the CERN mega-lab in
Switzerland, all 12 major Universities in the Netherlands, the University
of Southampton in the UK (from whom the model for the policy first came,
both here and for the Select Committee) and soon, we hope, the UK research
councils (RCUK). There were similar policies also already adopted by
Italian, Australian, Scandinavian and Portuguese universities (to varying
degrees: but now this too will increase).

(d) As a consequence, there should soon be a big increase in Open Access
worldwide, and (we hope) it will at last reach 100% before too much
longer!

Best wishes,


Stevan Harnad                     
Professor of Cognitive Science    
Department of Electronics and Computer Science     
University of Southampton         
Highfield, Southampton            
SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM           
phone: +44 23-80 592-582
fax:   +44 23-80 592-865
harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/