Dear Colleagues,
Will you give up one minute to sign a Petition to the European
Commission? I believe it will make a difference to our ability to carry
out and disseminate research. You can do this at:
http://www.ec-petition.eu/
The petition supports recent proposals made in an EC study, recommending
that all publicly funded research MUST be freely available to the
public. This is the position taken by the growing open access movement
which believes that traditional academic publishers restrict access to
knowledge and prevent researchers from disseminating their work as
widely as they would wish.
The current system of ever increasing journal subscription costs is
undermining the ability of university libraries to buy the books they
need and cutting off academics in poorer countries from the knowledge
they need to develop their own higher education and research.
Progressive publishers are now allowing various forms of open-access
sharing of refereed publications but until research funding agencies
insist on the public having access to the research they have paid for,
publishers will continue to coerce authors into signing away the
copyright to their knowledge.
If you believe this is acceptable, think about how academic journals
operate. The time and effort to produce knowledge is provided by
individual academics with support from their universities and funding
agencies. The crucial expertise to produce journals is provided by
academic editors who generally give their time free as part of their
scholarly work. Publishers then sell the knowledge back to the
universities who have produced it. Academic publishing is a lucrative
business, it's how the notorious Robert Maxwell made his first fortune,
and it is stuck in a time warp from the days when it was essential to
have access to an expensive printing press to be a publisher
For your own career, you may feel that having a paper in a prestigious
journal is a great benefit, but the most important benefit for your
research is that people should find out about it and give you credit for
contributing to their work. Impact studies are very difficult to carry
out but there is evidence, from citation counts, that the best way to be
visible is to have your work freely available on the internet. Open
access publishers do exist (including the new International Journal of
Design http://www.ijdesign.org/ojs/index.php/IJDesign/) but they are
fighting an uphill battle to gain acceptance because the older
established print journals still carry weight with conservative minded
academics.
If you want to see a vision of the future, have a look at
www.biomedcentral.com but to help move things along today please sign up
for the petition. 12000 people have signed already, from 37 countries,
including the heads of 51 Universities/Research organisations and 144
libraries. Here's the address again:
http://www.ec-petition.eu/
Best wishes from Sheffield
Chris Rust
********************
Professor Chris Rust FDRS
Head of Art and Design Research Centre
Sheffield Hallam University
Psalter Lane, S11 8UZ, UK
+44 114 225 2706 (direct)
+44 114 225 2686 (research admin)
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www.chrisrust.net
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