Re: UK Select Committee Inquiry into Scientific Publication

From: Philip Hunter <lispjh_at_ukoln.ac.uk>
Date: Mon, 10 May 2004 15:45:24 +0100

Stevan,

I'd be interested in what you think the Open Access status of research
output *not* funded by public organisations, or *partly* funded by
private organisations, ought to be.

    [Reply: Open Access (OA) should be provided to all articles published
    in peer-reviewed journals (24,000 journals, 2.5 million articles
    yearly). But the UK government is not in a position to mandate OA
    provision for all of those articles: only for those that are funded
    by UK government research funds. It is to be hoped, however, that
    the ripple effects of all the OA that helps to generate will then
    propagate to non-UK and non-government-funded research too. S.H.]

I'm also interested in your position on the Open Access status
of government funded research, particularly when access might be
available across national boundaries. Does a government have a duty
of confidentiality about its data when the interest of the state is
involved?

Philip

    [Reply: That is 100% irrlevevant to the question of OA. OA is
    about access to articles published in peer-reviewed journals. None
    of those articles is confidential, otherwise it would not have been
    published at all. S.H.]

    [Ceterum censeo: the research access/impact problem and the
    journal-affordability problem are *not the same problem. -- S.H.]

--------------------------------------------------------------------
Philip Hunter, UKOLN Research Officer.
UKOLN, University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY
Tel: +44 (0) 1225 323 668 Fax: +44 (0) 1225 826838=20
Email: p.j.hunter_at_ukoln.ac.uk UKOLN: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ =20
http://www.rdn.ac.uk/projects/eprints-uk/=20
--------------------------------------------------------------------

> ------
> 1.
> Subject: Re: UK Select Committee Inquiry into Scientific Publication
> >From: Stevan Harnad
>
> Helene Bosc has suggested that I re-post this excerpt from the bottom
> of a prior message, for those who may not have had the courage to work
> their way all the way down to the end!
>
> >rp> Would it be correct to say that you believe the only role for
> >rp> government here is to insist that the output from publicly funded
> >rp> research should be OA? (A suggestion, by the way, made by both
> >rp> Harold Varmus and Fred Friend to the UK Select Committee - and so
> >rp> perhaps a proposal that all OA advocates could agree on?).
>
> Yes:
>
> http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php
> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/ukparl.doc
>
> Stevan Harnad
>
Received on Mon May 10 2004 - 15:45:24 BST

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.3.0 : Fri Dec 10 2010 - 19:47:28 GMT