In advance of the 39th G8 summit currently taking place in Northern Ireland, the G8 science ministers met in London last week to discuss how they could improve the transparency, coherence and coordination of global scientific research. Following the talks, the group released a joint statement demonstrating a commitment to making research more open.

“Open enquiry is at the heart of scientific endeavour,” they state. “We are committed to openness in scientific research data to speed up the progress of scientific discovery, create innovation, ensure that the results of scientific research are as widely available as practical, enable transparency in science and engage the public in the scientific process”. The ministers have proposed a set of four principles to form …

Read more

Over the last few months a growing number of governments, funders and research institutions have been adopting new policies on open access. Last month, UNESCO became the latest high profile organisation to introduce such a policy, announcing that they would launch an open access repository in July 2013. All resources published by UNESCO after 1st June 2013 will be included in the repository under a CC-BY licence. According to Janis Karklins, UNESCO’s Assistant Director-General for Communication and Information, “Researchers from all countries will benefit and capitalize on Open Access to knowledge. Our new policy will enable us to increase the visibility, accessibility, and rapid distribution of our publications”.

Below is a roundup of some of our other open access highlights …

Read more

The Research Councils UK (RCUK) policy on open access came into effect last month, requiring all peer-reviewed published research articles and conference proceedings that it funds to be made openly available. The new policy reflects a growing trend amongst funding bodies mandating open access to research outputs and we wrote about this in more detail when the policy came into effect at the beginning of April.

Below is a roundup of some of our other open access highlights from March:

• Science Europe releases statement on open access
Science Europe, an association of fifty-one European national research organizations has released a major open access position statement. The statement recognises that “publication and dissemination of results are an integral part of …

Read more

The European Union looks set to become the latest funder to require open access to the outputs from research that it funds. Neelie Kroes, vice-president of the European Commission, has announced that all scientists receiving EU funding will have to publish their results in an open access format. The new policy reflects similar announcements from America, Australia and the UK over recent months.

Meanwhile, the Directory of Open Access Journals reached a new milestone last month of having a million articles searchable via the website. The DOAJ aims to increase the visibility and ease of use of open access journals and currently indexes close to 9000 titles

Below is a roundup of some of our other open access highlights from …

Read more

The Research Councils UK (RCUK) policy on open access came into effect yesterday, but what does it mean for researchers?

Following the publication of the Finch report in June last year, the UK government announced plans to make publically funded research freely available. That policy came into effect yesterday, meaning that all peer-reviewed published research articles and conference proceedings funded by RCUK must be open access.

RCUK is supporting both the green and gold options for open access but with a strong preference for the gold route, where papers are made freely available immediately on publication. Where a journal offers a gold option, and funds to cover the article processing charge are available from the research funder, authors will be …

Read more

Last month, the “Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act” (FASTR) was introduced in the US House of Representatives and US Senate. If passed the bill would require agencies with annual research budgets of $100 million or more to “develop a plan to support increased public access to the results of research funded by the federal government”. This would include papers published in peer-reviewed journals, which would need to be made open access within six months of publication – half the 12 month maximum embargo currently required by the National Institutes of Health. The bill comes following a petition to the White House last year, urging the government to require open access to the published results of …

Read more

An interesting debate arose last month regarding the role of the author in open access publishing. Mike Taylor, a research associate at the University of Bristol, wrote an item in The Guardian arguing that publishing your research behind a paywall is immoral. “If you are a scientist,” he said, “your job is to bring new knowledge into the world. And if you bring new knowledge into the world, it’s immoral to hide it”.

In response, Chris Chambers, a senior research fellow at Cardiff University countered that those who publish research behind paywalls are victims not perpetrators. It’s easy to say that researchers should publish in open access journals, but Chambers asks, “do scientists who follow accepted publishing practices …

Read more

Our first post of 2013 takes a look back at some of the open access highlights from the last month of 2012. The growth of open access over 2012 as a whole can be seen in the December edition of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access, a quarterly series published on the Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics blog. The most recent statistics show that the number of journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) has grown at around 3 per day, with 8,519 journals listed by the end of the year. The DOAJ also has almost 1,000,000 articles searchable, an increase of 33% on 2011.

Below is a roundup of some of our other open access …

Read more

Last month saw the sixth annual Open Access Week take place, and our colleagues at BioMed Central organised a number of events around the world to spread the word.

A study published in BMC Medicine at the start of the Open Access Week showed how open access publishing is becoming increasingly prevalent. The article received plenty of coverage, including a piece in UK newspaper The Guardian, which explained how the rise of open access is faster than anyone had previously realised. BMC Medicine hosted a Twitter chat at the end of the week to discuss some of the themes in the paper, as well as some of the wider issues surrounding open access publishing, and …

Read more