Forwarding from SPARC-OAForum. Ross
-----Original Message-----
From: SPARC Open Access Forum [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf
Of Peter Suber
Sent: 20 July 2004 01:40
To: SPARC Open Access Forum
Subject: [SOAF] Summary and excerpts from the UK report
At one minute past midnight on July 20, the UK House of Commons Science
and Technology Committee released the long-awaited report on its inquiry
into journal prices and open access (about 90 minutes ago).
Here's my summary of the major recommendations:
(1) The government should provide funds for all UK universities to
launch open-access institutional repositories.
(2) Authors of articles based on government-funded research should
deposit copies in their institutional repositories.
(3) The government should appoint a "central body" to oversee the launch
of the institutional repositories, their networking needs, and their
compliance with "technical standards needed to provide maximum
functionality" (presumably the OAI metadata harvesting protocol).
(4) The government should create a fund to help authors pay the
processing fees charged by open-access journals. The committee is not
yet ready to endorse the upfront funding model for OA journals (which it
calls the "author-pays" model), but wants to create such a fund in order
to promote further experimentation with the model.
(5) The government should develop a wider, long-term open-access
strategy, including open-access journals, "as a matter of urgency".
(6) Universities should develop their "capacity to manage" the
copyrights that faculty will increasingly retain in the future.
(7) These steps can and should be undertaken without jeopardizing
"rigorous and independent peer review".
(8) The government should fund the British Library to take on the
long-term preservation of digital scholarship.
(9) Because the market for science and scholarship is international, the
government should "act as a proponent for change on the international
stage and lead by example".
The full report (a 118 page PDF file) will soon be available at the
committee's page of reports,
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm/cmsctech.htm
[snip]
(I can confirm that the files are available online. Ross)
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