[Taxacom] FW: Press release: Worldwide call for open access to European research

[Donat Agosti]

Here a first encouraging sign for the call for open access to European
research data. - after about 10 days since the petition has been launched.


- 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: www.ec-petition.eu/
<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-stud
y_en.pdf



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



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