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Worldwide support for call to publish European research results via “open access”
31-01-2007
PRESS RELEASE
Nobel laureates Martinus Veltman, Harold Varmus and Richard Roberts, and the President of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), Frits van Oostrom, are among more than thirteen thousand researchers, administrators, managers and librarians from all over the world who since 17 January have signed an Internet petition organised by SURF (together with other organisations). The number of signatories is growing all the time. The petition calls on the European Commission to guarantee that the results of publicly financed research are published free of charge via “open access” , allowing them to be fully available for consultation by anyone in the world. Professor Van Oostrom has this to say: “I signed because in the Netherlands publishing has always been intimately associated with freedom. We are proud of our freedom of expression and our freedom to publish whatever we want. This petition by the open access movement is a contribution to the stringent requirements that I believe should apply to innovations in the information industry.”
In addition to the KNAW and other Dutch research institutions, more than 500 research and cultural organisations have already signed the petition. They include such renowned organisations as CERN, CNRS, the UK’s Medical Research Council, the Wellcome Trust, the Italian Rectors’ Conference, and the Swiss Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences (SAGW). The petition has also been signed by its initiators: SURF, SPARC Europe, JISC (UK Joint Information Systems Committee), the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and Danmarks Elektroniske Fag- og Forskningsbibliotek (DEFF).
Wide support
The petition calls on the European Commission to formally implement the recommendations set out in its Study on the Economic and Technical Evolution of the Scientific Publication Markets of Europe. The study (published in January 2006) makes a number of significant recommendations for achieving maximum accessibility of research articles. In particular, the first recommendation argues for “guaranteed public access to publicly-funded research results shortly after publication”. The petition, for which SURF was the primary initiator, is intended to illustrate the wide support in the scientific world for the recommendations arrived at in the study. On 15 and 16 February 2007 the European Commission will host a conference in Brussels to discuss its position on wider access to research results.
Time for change
David Prosser, director of SPARC Europe, one of the initiators of the petition, comments that the wide support expressed for the petition shows how much researchers are in fact longing for access to all research results. One of the signatories, Richard J. Roberts, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize for Medicine, says: "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.”
Note for editors:
The petition can be found at http://www.ec-petition.eu/. The EC’s 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
For further information, please contact Stichting SURF, Dr Leo Waaijers, tel. +31 (0)30 234 6600.