Frei zugängliche Wissenschaft: Schweiz will Rückstand aufholen - Schweiz - az Aargauer Zeitung
lterrat's bookmarks 2017-01-21
Summary:
"Scientific literature should be available online free of charge. This is a consensus. In Germany, universities are now distrusting with the powerful big publishers who fear their returns.
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In Germany, the dispute has escalated in the last few weeks. Under the leadership of the University Rectors' Conference, 60 scientific institutions are closing the contract with Elsevier at the end of last year. For three weeks, the publisher has denied access to universities from Aachen to Würzburg. In Switzerland one observes the power struggle attentively. To lead him on the side of the German colleagues, however, was apparently not to be trusted: the consortium of the Swiss university libraries extended the contract only just 2016, for the first time for a year. Neither the consortium nor the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich wanted to comment on the topic yesterday - 'politically too delicate'.
Dirk Verdicchio, Head of Open Access and Science Communication at the University of Berne, criticizes the stand-off. 'Swiss research is at a very high level,' he says. The interest of the publishers to continue to publish local journals in their journals is correspondingly large. 'If we played powerplay, they might be cutting down their overpriced prizes.'
Compared to Germany, Austria, Great Britain and the Netherlands, Switzerland is always defensive in terms of open access. 'We're lagging behind,' criticizes Verdicchio. At the end of 2015, the State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation commissioned the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) and Swissuniversities to develop a national strategy. These, however, pushed the pace: In the near future, the strategy will be adopted and an action plan drawn up.
The objective is ambitious, as research by 'Nordwestschweiz' shows: By 2024, all specialist essays by Swiss researchers will be published in open access mode. On request, SNSF department head Ingrid Kissling-Näf confirms this goal. "Research funds financed with public funds should be accessible whenever possible," she says. The SNSF has therefore for a long time obliged scientists to make their publications available online free of charge at the earliest. For articles in magazines, the deadline is six, 24 months for books."