At last, an article that gets the point (though it should have been
entitled "Confused decision on access to research articles"!):
Confused decision on science publishing
Richard Wray
Tuesday November 9, 2004
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,3604,1346605,00.html
But it's far from over! Dr. Ian Gibson, MP and head of the Committee,
is initiating an unusually determined and forceful next round, and
there are many reasons to expect a more favourable outcome as more and
more comes out into the open:
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/1200/120003.htm
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/1200/120004.htm
The UK is a democracy, not a cartel, and in this case even the
publisher lobby that had such an influence on the DTI response that
quashed this first round probably misunderstood (rather than willfully
misconstrued) the Report, and will reconsider in face of a briefer and
more focussed distillation of the essence of the Committee's recommendation.
(If the press is at last beginning to understand, there is no reason why
MPs and publishers will not soon twig too!)
And meanwhile, there are parallel developments afoot in the UK.
The Research Councils UK
http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/business.asp
are preparing a report
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/Library/scholarly-communication/acoscnews_oct04.shtml
and, one hopes, a policy to implement the Report's main recommendation
to make the self-archiving of resulting articles one of the conditions
of receiving RCUK funding. That would effectively implement the sense of
the Committee's recommendation, and would even improve on its US counterpart,
the NIH funding proposal, in not applying only to biomedical research
funded by one funding agency (biomedical), but to all RCUK-funded
research output, across all disciplines.
Stevan Harnad
Received on Tue Nov 09 2004 - 09:13:17 GMT