[Ip-health] Worldwide call for open access to European research

[Judit Rius Sanjuan]

Petition on behalf of the worldwide Open Access movement:
http://www.ec-petition.eu/

The EC-commissioned Study on the Economic and Technical Evolution of the
Scientific Publication Markets of Europe is available at:
http://ec.europa.eu/research/science-society/pdf/scientific-publication-study_en.pdf


---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 29 Jan 2007 12:04:52 -0000
From: Philip POTHEN <p.pothen --- JISC.AC.UK>
Subject: Press release: Worldwide call for open access to European research

- Apologies for cross-posting -

Press Release

Worldwide call for free and open access to European research results

Over 10,000 individuals sign petition to European Commission to
guarantee public access to publicly funded research

January 29th 2007. Nobel laureates Harold Varmus and Rich Roberts are
among the more than ten thousand concerned researchers, senior academics,
lecturers, librarians, and citizens from across Europe and around the
world who are signing an internet petition calling on the European
Commission to adopt polices to guarantee free public access to research
results and maximise the worldwide visibility of European research.

Organisations too are lending their support, with the most senior
representatives from over 500 education, research and cultural
organisations in the world adding their weight to the petition,
including CERN, the UK's Medical Research Council, the Wellcome Trust,
the Italian Rector's Conference, the Royal Netherlands Academy for Arts
& Sciences (KNAW) and the Swiss Academy for the Humanities and Social
Sciences (SAGW), alongside the petition's sponsors, SPARC Europe, JISC,
the SURF Foundation, the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the Danish
Electronic Research Library (DEFF).

The petition calls on the EC to formally endorse the recommendations
outlined in the EC-commissioned Study on the Economic and Technical
Evolution of the Scientific Publication Markets of Europe. Published in
early 2006, the study made a number of important recommendations to help
ensure the widest possible readership for scholarly articles. In
particular, the first recommendation called for 'Guaranteed public
access to publicly-funded research results shortly after publication' .

The EC will host a meeting in Brussels in February to discuss its
position regarding widening access and the petition is intended to
convey the
overwhelming level of public support for the recommendations of the EC
study.

JISC Executive Secretary Dr Malcolm Read, said: 'Maximising public
investment in European research and making more widely available its
outputs are key priorities for the European Union as it seeks to enhance
the global standing of European research and compete in a global market.
JISC is proud to be sponsoring a petition which seeks these vital goals
and which has already attracted such widespread support.'

One of the petition's signatories, Richard J Roberts, Nobel Prize winner
for Physiology or Medicine in 1993, said: "Open access to the published
scientific literature is one of the most desirable goals of our current
scientific enterprise. Since most science is supported by taxpayers it
is unreasonable that they should not have immediate and free access to
the results of that research. Furthermore, for the research community
the literature is our lifeblood. By impeding access through
subscriptions and then fragmenting the literature among many different
publishers, with no central source, we have allowed the commercial
sector to impede progress. It is high time that we rethought the model
and made sure that everyone had equal and unimpeded access to the whole
literature. How can we do cutting edge research if we don't know where
the cutting edge is?"

The petition is available at: http://www.ec-petition.eu/

The EC-commissioned Study on the Economic and Technical Evolution of the
Scientific Publication Markets of Europe is available at:
http://ec.europa.eu/research/science-society/pdf/scientific-publication-study_en.pdf


The petition is sponsored by JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee,
UK), SURF (Netherlands) , SPARC Europe, DFG (Deutsche
Forschungsgemeinsch aft,Germany), DEFF (Danmarks Elektroniske Fag- og
Forskningsbibliotek ,Denmark).

For further information, please contact: Philip Pothen (JISC) on 07887
564 006 or p.pothen@jisc.ac.uk

--

Judit Rius Sanjuan
Attorney
judit.rius at cptech.org
www.cptech.org

Consumer Project on Technology
1621 Connecticut Ave, NW, Suite 500, Washington, DC 20009 USA
Tel.:  +1.202.332.2670, Ext 18 Fax: +1.202.332.2673