From Peter Suber's Open Access News
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2005_05_22_fosblogarchive.html#a111728787088695309
FAQ on OA from four major UK organizations
Four important UK research organizations have produced a succinct
FAQ on open access,
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/issue_qaopen.html
Questions and answers about opening up access to research results. The
four organizations are Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC),
Research Councils UK (RCUK), Council for the Central Laboratory for
the Research Councils (CLRC), and the Research Libraries Network
(RLN). Currently, 10 of the 12 questions are about OA archiving and
two about OA journals. From the introduction: 'Our four organisations
believe that, as a matter of principle, the outputs of publicly
funded research should be made available as widely and rapidly
as possible. Hence we are taking steps to encourage free on-line
access to research results. This document briefly describes what is
meant by Open Access and repositories and attempts to answer some
common questions that researchers pose....The day is approaching when
anybody, anywhere with a computer and internet connection will be able
to access research data or scholarly journal articles, free of charge,
as soon as they are placed on-line. In future, researchers whose
institutions cannot afford journal subscriptions will nonetheless
be able to access articles describing the results of publicly funded
research....To stimulate these changes, we are encouraging researchers
to place their papers in digital repositories. We are backing up our
action with our own research and development programmes to address
the key issues as they arise.'
(PS: This is a useful document --as important for its clear answers as
for its institutional backers. It also gives an encouraging glimpse
of the still-forthcoming RCUK policy on OA.)
Permanent link to this post Posted by Peter Suber at 9:35 AM.
I agree with Peter that this is a useful document. I would add only that the
cost estimate -- "Initial start-up costs of around £80k might be expected,
followed by an annual cost of about £40k to cover recurrent costs such as staff
(including overheads), equipment and software" -- is *not* for just an OA
archive, which can be created and maintained for far, far less:
http://www.arl.org/sparc/pubs/enews/aug01.html#6
The much higher estimate is for an Institutional Repository intended to
do a lot of other things for an institution over and above providing
Open Access to its journal article output. All those other things are
fine, and desirable, but it is misleading and a mistake to call their
price tag the price tag for providing OA! It makes it seem that providing
OA to 100% of an institution's self-archived journal article output
would be an order of magnitude more costly than it really is!
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2837.html
With OA already long overdue, and research impact (and impact
income!) still being needlessly lost daily, monthly, yearly, this is
not the time to give the incorrect impression that an institution cannot
provide 100% OA unless it is ready to pay£80k down and£40k recurrent! If
they do that, then they get a lot more than OA for their money, but if
they are not ready or able to do that, they can still have 100% OA for
a lot less money (under a tenth of those estimates)!
Stevan Harnad
AMERICAN SCIENTIST OPEN ACCESS FORUM:
A complete Hypermail archive of the ongoing discussion of providing
open access to the peer-reviewed research literature online (1998-2005)
is available at:
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/
To join or leave the Forum or change your subscription address:
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html
Post discussion to:
american-scientist-open-access-forum_at_amsci.org
UNIVERSITIES: If you have adopted or plan to adopt an institutional
policy of providing Open Access to your own research article output,
please describe your policy at:
http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php
UNIFIED DUAL OPEN-ACCESS-PROVISION POLICY:
BOAI-1 ("green"): Publish your article in a suitable toll-access journal
http://romeo.eprints.org/
OR
BOAI-2 ("gold"): Publish your article in a open-access journal if/when
a suitable one exists.
http://www.doaj.org/
AND
in BOTH cases self-archive a supplementary version of your article
in your institutional repository.
http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/
http://archives.eprints.org/
Received on Sat May 28 2005 - 18:18:26 BST