A Journey to Open Access – Part 6 | Tony Hey on eScience

Amsciforum 2013-04-04

Summary:

Since the beginning of the year, the momentum for open access to research publications has grown dramatically. On 13 February 2013, the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research (FASTR) Act was introduced in the US Senate ... FASTR would require open access to peer-reviewed research papers arising from federally-funded research and would require the major federal research funding agencies—including DOE, NIH and NSF—to make these papers freely available to the public through a digital archive maintained by the agency. Significantly, the bill not only talks about the requirement of accessibility—with a suggested maximum embargo time of 6 months—but also highlights the need to maximize the utility of the research by enabling re-use ... Such automated analysis would permit a genuine realization of the vision of the Memex put forward by Vannevar Bush in his seminal paper ‘As We May Think’. The FASTR act also includes another far-sighted requirement that federal agencies consider whether or not the terms of use should include 'a royalty free copyright license that is available to the public and that permits the reuse of those research papers, on the condition that attribution is given to the author or authors of the research and any others designated by the copyright owner'. As Heather Joseph points out in her SPARC newsletter, this would effectively require research papers to be published under some form of Creative Commons license.  On 22 February, just eight days after FASTR was introduced into both houses of Congress, the White House issued a directive requiring the major Federal Funding agencies 'to develop a plan to support increased public access to the results of research funded by the Federal Government.' Significantly, these results include not only peer-reviewed publications but also digital data ...  The White House memorandum is from John Holdren, Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy and underlines the Obama Administration’s belief that federally-supported basic research can catalyze innovative breakthroughs that can help grow the US economy ... We now have OA mandates coming from both the Legislative and the Executive branches of the US Government ... For more commentary on both FASTR and the White House memorandum see Peter Suber’s blog.  In the USA, I believe that these developments represent a tipping point for the Open Access movement. But besides the dramatic moves towards Open Access in the US and the UK, there have also been significant developments elsewhere around the world. In Europe, a press release from the European Commission in July 2012 about the new Horizon 2020 Research Framework stated that: 'As a first step, the Commission will make open access to scientific publications a general principle of Horizon 2020 …'  Note that like the USA—and unlike the UK—the European Commission also does not favor gold OA over green. Similarly, in Australia, the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) and the Australian Research Council (ARC) both back green OA via repositories ...  Back in the UK, some re-thinking of Finch and RCUK’s OA policy is taking place. A recent review by the House of Lords criticized RCUK for failures in communication and for lack of clarity about its policy and guidance. Prior to a more complete review of its policy in 2014, RCUK issued a revision of its Open Access policy on 6 March 2013. The major change was that there is now an explicit statement that although RCUK prefers gold, either green or gold is acceptable ... Finally, in May of last year there was the inaugural meeting of a new organization called the Global Research Council (GRC) in Washington DC. The meeting was prompted by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy who invited the NSF to host a meeting of the world’s research funding agencies to discuss global standards of peer review for basic research. The GRC is a virtual organization with members of the Governing Board from the US, Germany, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Japan, China, Europe, Canada, Russia and India. The result of the first summit attended by around 50 research agencies was an agreed statement on ‘Merit Review’... The second summit meeting of the GRC will take place in Berlin from 27 to 29 May 2013, hosted by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the Brazilian CNPq agency. The main goal of this summit will be to agree on an action plan for implementing Open Access to Publications as the main paradigm of scientific communication in

Link:

http://tonyhey.net/2013/04/04/a-journey-to-open-access-part-6/

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » Amsciforum
Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.mandates oa.data oa.licensing oa.comment oa.usa oa.green oa.copyright oa.cc oa.australia oa.uk oa.funders oa.embargoes oa.ostp oa.nhmrc oa.arc oa.grc oa.horizon2020 oa.fastr oa.obama_directive oa.rcuk oa.europe oa.repositories oa.libre oa.policies

Date tagged:

04/04/2013, 14:17

Date published:

04/04/2013, 14:42