On 15 Mar 2005, at 12:11, Michael Fraser wrote:
Just in case it's of interest, the Guardian has a short but effective piece on the Scottish Declaration on Open Access (http://scurl.ac.uk/WG/OATS/declaration.htm) -- 16 universties committed to institutional repositories (or a jointly-developed central repository) and some considering mandating academics to self-archive.
This is very good news indeed! Derek Law (who is quoted in the article) gave a very rousing talk about the development and background to the Scottish Declaration at the recent Berlin-3 conference. His slides and a video of his presentation are available from the conference website at http://www.eprints.org/berlin3/program.html . Although the video is large, I thoroughly recommend waiting for it to download as Derek talks very convincingly about the emerging rationale behind forming an institutional and national consensus on Open Access. The Declaration itself is a somewhat mixed-up document, conflating OA publishing, OA archiving library economics and the revolution of scholarly publishing systems, however it ends with a remarkably focused and effective set of actions directed at funders, institutions and government. Institutions (in particular) are enjoined to (a) set up a repository, (b) encourage AND WHERE PRACTICAL MANDATE researchers to deposit their output and their students' PhD theses and (c) to review intellectual property policies to ensure that researchers have the right and duty to provide open access to their research. What is particularly notable is that there is no institutional action relating to publishing in OA journals, despite the fact that OA publishing is well represented in the text of the declaration and in the funders' actions. I would be interested to hear the reasons for this - was it difficult to overcome researchers' reluctance to change their publishing habits? --- Les Carr