[Foundation-l] Access to academic journals (was Re: Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser)

Wed Mar 9 16:48:21 UTC 2011

I posted the two links in the pub of the dutch wiki, and 2 reactions are
worth mentioning.

One volunteer offered to look up scientific articles, as a student he has
free access to many science publishers through his university library. I had
more such offers in the past, and it may be worth to have a page for
volunteers who are willing to look up specific facts.  That might be an
idead for other wikis. I doubt it would be legal to pass on an entire pdf.

The second remarked concerned established publishers like Springer and
Elsevier, who according to the volunteer offer authors the choice to pay a
bit more and have their publciatiuons open access. That sounds like an
interesting development to me.

Teun Spaans

On Wed, Mar 9, 2011 at 3:30 PM, Melissa Hagemann <MHagemann at sorosny.org>wrote:

> On Wed, 9 Mar 2011, John Vandenberg <jayvdb at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > > And if there is interest in advocating on this issue, SPARC
> developed
> > > the Alliance for Taxpayer Access
> > > (http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/action/index.shtml) which represents
> > > universities, libraries, patient advocacy groups, and physicians
> working
> > > to promote OA.
> >
> > I haven't heard of this before.
> >
> > The website/campaign name begs a lot of questions.
> >
> > "Why tax-payer access only?"
>
> The message of public access to publicly funded research resonates with
> policymakers.
>
> > "What copyright license allows for tax-payer only redistribution?"
>
> Once it is available to the taxpayers who fund it, it is made freely
> available online to everyone, in every country.
>
> > If I understand correctly, they are promoting unrestricted access to
> > tax-payer funded research.  Do they explicitly want govt-funded
> > research to be public domain, like US federal works are, and therefore
> > accessible to everyone, in every country?
>
> Probably the biggest victory to date for the OA movement was a mandate
> adopted by the U.S. NIH which stipulates that all the research funded by
> the NIH (which amounts to approximately $29 billion annually) is now
> made freely available through PubMed Central
> (http://publicaccess.nih.gov/). Now the OA movement in the U.S. is
> trying to extend this type of mandate to all federal research funding
> agencies with budgets over $100 million. Likewise, there are projects
> underway in other countries to advocate for similar policies, including
> an open letter recently announced which targets UK funding councils
> (http://tinyurl.com/64v9nvc). And finally, in addition to federal
> research funding agencies, the OA movement also works with universities
> to advocate for the adoption of institutional mandates which stipulate
> that all  research produced by those affiliated with a university or
> faculty be made freely available (see OA policies adopted by several of
> Harvard's Faculties http://osc.hul.harvard.edu/).
>
> So some progress, but much more to do!
>
> Melissa
>
> > --
> > John Vandenberg
>
>
>
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