Researcher Support for Open Access to Research

[Stevan Harnad]

Dear Colleagues,

The European Commission, the European Research Advisory Board and the
European Research Councils have recently each recommended adopting
the policy of providing Open Access to research results:

    http://europa.eu.int/comm/research/science-society/pdf/scientific-publication-study_en.pdf
    http://ec.europa.eu/research/eurab/pdf/eurab_scipub_report_recomm_dec06_en.pdf
    http://erc.europa.eu/pdf/open-access.pdf

(Very similar recommendations are also being made by governmental research
organisations in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Asia.)

There are non-research interests strongly lobbying against these
recommendations, so a display of support by the research community is
critically important.

A consortium of European organisations working in the scholarly
communication arena is now sponsoring a petition to the European
Commission to demonstrate support for these recommendations on the part
of the European and worldwide research community.

Signatures may be added by individual researchers or universities and
research institutions.

I would strongly urge you to register your support. To sign the
petition, please go to:

    http://www.ec-petition.eu/

The sponsoring organisations are JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee,
UK), SURF (Netherlands), SPARC Europe, DFG (Deutsches
Forschungsgemeinschaft, Germany), DEFF (Danmarks Elektroniske Fag- og
Forskningsbibliotek, Denmark).

Many thanks and best wishes,

Stevan Harnad
Chaire de recherche du Canada			Professor of Cognitive Science    
Ctr. de neuroscience de la cognition	Dpt. Electronics & Computer Science
Université du Québec à Montréal			University of Southampton         
Montréal, Québec						Highfield, Southampton
Canada  H3C 3P8							SO17 1BJ United Kingdom
http://www.crsc.uqam.ca/				http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/