Annex 1
RECENT INITIATIVES
IN OPEN-ACCESS
PUBLICATION
A. Publishing initiatives
1. PubMedCentral (originally called E-Biomed)
is an initiative, led by the US National Institutes for Health,
which encourages publishers to deposit electronically copies of
published papers in an archive where they are made freely available
via the web[285].
PubMedCentral only contains articles that have already been published
in existing journals. Although the initiative has extensive support
from scientists, to date most publishers have refused to include
their journals in PubMedCentral.
2. Highwire Press[286]
is the online publisher for many learned society publishers, including
some of those publishers unwilling to participate in PubMedCentral.
3. The Open Archives Initiative[287]
encourages researchers to deposit copies of their papers as e-prints
in a public repository. These can be linked so that a global search
of repositories is easy to carry out. Many Universities have established
repositories, as have the Max Planck Institute (Germany) and the
Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (INIST—France).
In physics, mathematics and computer science the arXiv repository
is well-established (see Annex 4).
4. During 2003, publishers BioMed Central
signed two agreements that have broadened the scope for biomedical
open-access publishing in the UK: in March with the NHS, and in
June with the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). Both
deals mean that, subject to a flat fee from the NHS and JISC,
article-processing charges are now waived for all NHS staff and
UK higher education staff respectively when publishing in any
of BioMed Central's 90-odd peer-reviewed journals in which all
research content is free. However, although this initiative clearly
has high-profile support, the volume of papers published is still
quite low.
B. Institutional announcements and declarations
5. In addition to publishing initiatives,
a number of recent institutional announcements and declarations
are contributing to the debate, thereby accelerating the momentum
in favour of open-access publication. These are listed below.
6. The Budapest Open-access Initiative (February
2002) is a manifesto that seeks to provide philosophical justification
to the goal of generalising open-access to peer-reviewed journal
literature, using two principal means: self-archiving and open-access
journals.
7. The Bethesda Statement on open-access
publishing (June 2003) is a declaration of intent that seeks to
stimulate discussion on how best to achieve open-access to scientific
literature. It incorporates a succinct draft definition, based
on two key conditions[288],
of open-access publication (since picked up by others—see
below), as well as annexed statements from specific perspectives
(ie academic institutions/funding agencies, publishers/libraries
and scientific researchers). Most of the participants at the meeting
that endorsed the statement were from the USA—although there
was a small UK presence, notably the then Director-elect of the
Wellcome Trust.
8. October 2003 saw the signature of the
Berlin Declaration on open-access to knowledge in the sciences
and humanities[289].
This notably commits the signatories "to promote the Internet
as a functional instrument for a global scientific knowledge base
and human reflection and to specify measures which research policy
makers, research institutions, funding agencies, libraries, archives
and museums need to consider." It reproduces the Bethesda's
Statement definition of open-access publication (although importantly,
it has removed the requirement to deposit material into a repository
"immediately upon initial publication"). The initiative
leading to the declaration was led by the Max Planck Institute
and other German institutes, but the initial signatories also
include other major international players, notably CNRS and INSERM
from France. At this stage, there are no UK signatories, though
some Research Council Chief Executives have been asked to sign
it.
9. In the UK, November 2003, the Wellcome
Trust issued a similar statement that also reproduces the Bethesda
Statement's definition, including the requirement to deposit "immediately
upon initial publication". The statement also commits the
Trust to "meet the cost of publication charges including
those for online-only journals for Trust-funded research by permitting
Trust researchers to use contingency funds for this purpose."
10. Finally, on 30 January 2004, OECD science
ministers[290]
adopted a Declaration on access to research data from public funding,
asking the OECD to take further steps towards proposing principles
and guidelines on access to such research data; the proposals
will be considered by the OECD Council at an unspecified future
date. The declaration consists mostly of an outline of principles.
Whilst calling for the "establishment of access regimes for
digital research data from public funding", it does not specify
what such regimes might be. Research Councils expect to input
to any consultation leading to the formulation of the OECD proposals.
285 See www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/ Back
286
See http://highwire.stanford.edu/ Back
287
See www.openarchives.org/ Back
288
The Bethesda Statement defines an open-access publication as
one that meets the following two conditions: Back
289
See http://www.zim.mpg.de/openaccess-berlin/signatories.html Back
290
Lord Sainsbury signed on behalf of the UK. Back
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