[GOAL] Recent OA developments in Australia

[Richard Poynder]

Last month Elsevier withdrew its support for the controversial Research Works Act. Had it become law, the RWA would have rolled back the NIH Public Access Policy requiring that funded researchers make their papers freely available on the Web within 12 months of publication. It would also have outlawed other US federal agencies from introducing similar policies. As such, the bill was a direct assault on Green Open Access. But while Elsevier’s retreat was a big win for supporters of Open Access, OA will continue to be a brick-by-brick process — as evidenced by recent events in Australia.

 

More here: http://poynder.blogspot.com/2012/03/open-access-brick-by-brick.html

 

[Stevan Harnad]

Let universities and research funders follow the UK's lead, not Australia's lag:
Forget about Gold OA publishing for now and mandate the researcher keystrokes
that would have given us 100% [Green] OA 20 years ago, had they only been done,
unmandated, 20 years ago.

The reward will not only be 100% [Green] OA at long last, putting an end to 20 years of
needlessly lost research impact globally, but Gold OA at a fair price soon thereafter.
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/21818/

Stevan Harnad

PS Apart from desperate and appallingly maladroit (and doomed) lobbying efforts
with governments (and confidential bargaining efforts with customers) to try to deter
or delay Green OA mandates, Elsevier has nothing to do with it, one way or the other:
Providing OA is entirely -- repeat: entirely -- in the research community's hands
(and fingertips), once they awaken from their insouciant slumber and realize at last
that it is -- and has been all along.
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/17298/3/giantpaper1.pdf

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