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January 05, 2004
Once more on open access in THES
More on open archiving The latest THES runs a piece by Geoff Watts on open access, following up on an earlier article i covered in this blog. The author cites two examples of the problem open access hopes to solve:
1. He searches the Nature website for articles on open access and finds as the first result among 190 an article entitled: Scientific publishing: who will pay for open access? But he would have to pay $18 to view it
2. He also cites Mark Walport, Director of the Wellcome Trust, who told a recent JISC meeting how he had tried to access a report in Journal of Infectious Disease report on malaria research in Gambia, work funded by the Wellcome, but got the message "access denied".
Watts discusses various solutions:
PubMed Central : set up by the US National Library of Medicine, to offer free access to all peerreviewed life sciences literature
Public Library of Science: PLoS have moved away from their original model of asking researchers to pledge not to work with journals that didn't make content freely available six months after publication, but have now started to developing their own journal titles, PLoS Biology being the first. PLoS medicine is to launched later this year
Institutional selfarchiving: here they quote, as before, Steve Harnad of Southampton , the leading UK champion of selfarchiving.
I must point out that the online content of the THES itself is not freely available, but is only accessible to subscribers through a rather clunky password system. The paper reference is:
Watts, Geoff
Crusaders for a truly free flow of ideas
THES 2004 1621: 1718
Posted by Suzanne at January 5, 2004 12:00 AM
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