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From: Cable Green <cable(a)creativecommons.org>
[Forwarding from the Open Society Foundations and SPARC.]
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: September 12, 2012
CONTACT: Andrea Higginbotham, SPARC, andrea(a)arl.org; 202-296-2296
Amy Weil, Open Society Foundations, aweil(a)sorosny.org; 212-548-0381
Scientists, Foundations, Libraries, Universities, and Advocates Unite and
Issue New Recommendations to Make Research Freely Available to All Online
WASHINGTON -- In response to the growing demand to make research free and
available to anyone with a computer and an internet connection, a diverse
coalition today issued new guidelines (
http://www.soros.org/openaccess/boai-10-recommendations) that could usher
in huge advances in the sciences, medicine, and health.
The recommendations were developed by leaders of the Open Access movement (
http://www.soros.org/openaccess/participants), which has worked for the
past decade to provide the public with unrestricted, free access
to scholarly research—much of which is publicly funded. Making the
research publicly available to everyone—free of charge and without most
copyright and licensing restrictions—will accelerate scientific research
efforts and allow authors to reach a larger number of readers.
“The reasons to remove restrictions as far as possible are to share
knowledge and accelerate research. Knowledge has always been a public good
in a theoretical sense. Open Access makes it a public good in practice,”
said professor Peter Suber, director of the Open Access Project at
Harvard University and a senior researcher at SPARC (The
Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition).
The Open Access recommendations include the development of Open Access
policies in institutions of higher education and in funding
agencies, the open licensing of scholarly works, the development of
infrastructure such as Open Access repositories and creating standards of
professional conduct for Open Access publishing. The recommendations also
establish a new goal of achieving Open Access as the default method for
distributing new peer-reviewed research in every field and in every country
within ten years’ time.
“Science and scholarship are activities funded from the public purse
because society believes they will lead to a better future in terms of our
health, environment, and culture,” said Heather Joseph, executive director
of SPARC. “Anything that maximises the efficacy and efficiency of
research benefits every one of us. Open Access is a major tool in that
quest. These new recommendations will underpin future developments in
communicating the results of research over the next decade.”
Today, Open Access is increasingly recognized as a right rather than an
abstract ideal. The case for rapid implementation of Open Access continues
to grow. Open Access benefits research and researchers; increases the
return to taxpayers on their investment in research; and amplifies the
social value of research, funding agencies, and research institutions.
The Open Access recommendations are the result of a meeting hosted earlier
this year by the Open Society Foundations, on the tenth anniversary of the
landmark Budapest Open Access Initiative (
http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read), which first defined Open Access.
“Foundations rarely have the good fortune to be actively present at the
birth of a world-wide movement that fundamentally changes the rules of
the game and provides immediate benefit to the world,” said István
Rév, director of the Open Society Archives and a member of the Open
Society Foundations Global Board. “This is what happened when the Open
Society Foundations initiated a meeting at the end of 2001 that gave birth
to the Open Access movement.”
###
SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), with SPARC
Europe and SPARC Japan, is an international alliance of more than
800 academic and research libraries working to create a more open system of
scholarly communication. SPARC’s advocacy, educational,
and publisher partnership programs encourage expanded dissemination of
research. SPARC is on the Web at
http://www.arl.org/sparc.
The Open Society Foundations work to build vibrant and tolerant democracies
whose governments are accountable to their citizens. Working with local
communities in more than 100 countries, the Open Society Foundations
support justice and human rights, freedom of expression, and access to
public health and education. The Open Society Foundations is on the Web at
http://www.soros.org.
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