[Sigiii-l] Press Release on Open Access meeting at WSIS

[Subbiah Arunachalam]

Press Release

    A growing number of scientists worldwide are actively promoting
    'open access' to the scientific literature. This means toll-free
    online access to the full-texts of all refereed research articles. At
    present, except the fraction of articles for which a suitable
    open-access journal already exists today (<5%), research is only
    accessible if the researcher's institution can afford to pay for the
    toll-access journal in which it is published (>95%). As a result,
    most of the potential users of research -- and especially those in
    developing countries -- are unable to access most research. This
    represents a great loss to both research-providers and
    research-users, and hence to the progress and benefits of
    research itself. Fortunately, the Internet and Web technologies
    have at last opened up the possibility for those researchers
    whose institutions cannot afford the toll-access version of any
    article to use instead the open-access version, self-archived on the
    author's own institutional website. The provision of open access to
    their own refereed research output by researchers and their
    institutions needs systematic worldwide promotion. We are holding
    a three-hour meeting on open-access provision at Geneva as a side
    event at WSIS. Please publicise the meeting. More important,
    read and write about the substantial benefits of open access for the
    progress and benefits of science. (For some useful information:
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/ )





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