Open access and metrics: the Ball committee report | Peter Cameron's Blog

"I mentioned this report in an earlier post; I am grateful to John Ball for directing me to the report on the web (here; the press release is here). The overall conclusions are clear. The ICSU goals for open access are that the scientific record should be free of financial barriers for any researcher to contribute to; free of financial barriers for any user to access immediately on publication; made available without restriction on reuse for any purpose, subject to proper attribution; quality-assured and published in a timely manner; and archived and made available in perpetuity. These goals and their implication are discussed in detail in the report, which I urge you to read. Some related complications discussed include availability of data (this is very important in science but less so in mathematics); copyright issues; and legitimate constraints on open access (the report says 'openness should be the norm which is deviated from only with good reason'). The reason why bibliometrics are also in the title is that these are used in research evaluation, often in a rather crude way which will have to change as publication norms change ..."