Legislation Addressed Public Access of NIH-Funded Research
The House of Representatives passed the NIH (National Institutes of Health) Reauthorization Bill on Tuesday, Sept. 26th, which questioned the participation rate and effectiveness of NIH’s Public Access Policy for its research projects. The Alliance for Taxpayer Access reports that:
The importance of the public access policy was also brought into focus at last week’s markup of the bill, when Congressman Mike Doyle of Pennsylvania echoed concerns about the meager participation rate – less than five percent – under the current voluntary policy.
"There’s just no better way to put it – it’s not right. The American taxpayer paid for this research – they’ll pay nearly 30 billion dollars next year alone – and they are entitled to expect that publicly funded research is available to anyone who might use it to improve health conditions in the U.S. and around the world," Doyle said at the markup.
Poem and Cartoons about Open Access
There is a poem with cartoons to tell the benefits of open access! It is available in both pdf and PowerPoint formats. A bilingual (French/English) version is also available in pdf and PowerPoint formats.
The authors, Dr. Stevan Harnad and Judith Economos, welcome people to use the poem and cartoons to promote open access. Kudos to them!
A quote from Dr. Harnad: "Self-Archive Unto Others As You Would Have Them Self-Archive Unto You"
More Universities Support Broader Access to Government Funded Research
Six public universities in New England have issued a letter of support for the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) of 2006. There are now 125 leaders in higher education who have shown support for FRPAA.
Funding Agencies’ Policies on Open Access
BioMed Central has conducted a survey on biomedical research funding agencies’ policies with regard to their support for open access publication. Here is a summary of the findings based on the 33 agencies that responded:
- 32 funders have confirmed that they are willing to fund article processing charges [fees charged by publishers for providing open access publication]
- 16 funders are signatories of one of the major international declarations in support of open access
- 15 funders have an official policy in support of open access
- 11 of these funder policies encourage or in some cases require funding recipients to deposit resulting research articles in an open access repository
There is also a table that breaks down the findings by country.
Forum on Improving Access to Publicly Funded Research
The Association of Research Libraries, the Coalition for Networked Information, and the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition are co-sponsoring a one-day forum, "Improving Access to Publicly Funded Research: Policy Issues and Practical Strategies." It is designed for different constituents in the academic community, including university provosts for research and academic affairs, legislative affairs officers, information technology administrators, and library directors.
Evaluating DRM
While this article (Evaluating DRM: Building a marketplace for the convergent world) is targeted at consumer advocates and the general public, it provides an overview of how to evaluate products that incorporate digital rights management (DRM). Given the fact that commercial products play a significant role in the dissemination and retrieval of scholarly information, this article will help scholars understand how DRM generates impacts on education and research.
The article also provides a DRM metrics quick reference chart.
New European Repository Project
Originally posted by Sara Ranger:
Charmlingly called DRIVER, for the Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research, a new project will allow a consortium of research institutions to create a large-scale repository. They have given themselves 18 months to "develop" the repository, which will include items from all scientific disciplines.
I keep awaiting news of an uber-repository, or meta-repository, that will allow users to search items in a variety of smaller repositories. It seems to me that there are so many repositories now that unless they are crawled by commercial search engines the items they hold will be found by a finite audience.
Search Engine for Open Access Resources
Simon Fraser University Library in Canada has made available a tool (dbWiz) to help people search for open access resources. Users can choose the sources from which to search. While the sources seem to be Canada-based, dbWiz does offer the options of Directory of Open Access Journals and PubMed Central. The search interface is easy to follow. However, it does not work very well with Mozilla and Firefox.
Kudos to Simon Fraser University Library!
OA, not just for research universities
Originally posted by Sara Ranger:
According to a recent posting in the higher ed news blog, inside higher ed, a large group of liberal arts colleges joined together to create a letter stating their support of open access. For the smaller schools, the issue is partly about finances, partly about access and exposure to a wide variety of research. I attended one of these schools and I can attest to the importance of the library and its journal holdings, especially at an institution that requires a senior thesis.
Open Access Update Page
Charles Bailey has created an Open Access Update Web Page to help you keep up on the reporting of open access in the blogosphere. It "presents the latest 30 headlines from [an open-access-focused aggregate feed] and provides links to OA-related mailing list archives, Peter Suber’s OA overview, OA-related journals, and OA-related Wikis."
P.S.: The feed to the Update Page has been improved and expanded. The page is also available as a MySyndicaat Feedbot Web page.
