Cambridge University Library

Open Access in the News

30 January 2012 - The Chronicle of Higher Education: Elsevier Publishing Boycott Gathers Steam Among Academics

16 January 2012 - The Guardian: Academic publishers have become the enemies of science. The US Research Works Act would allow publishers to line their pockets by locking publicly funded research behind paywalls

8 December 2011 - New policy announced by David Willetts to make research freely available (§ 6). In the press: New Scientist: UK to make publicly funded research free to read. The Guardian: Results of publicly funded research will be open access – science minister.

18 November 2011 - Ten Tales of Drivers & Barriers in Data Sharing. These ten tales, selected by the Opportunities for Data Exchange (ODE) project, funded by the European Commission (FP7), are based on personal interviews with leaders in scientific communities, research infrastructures, management and policy initiatives.

24 -30 October 2011 - Open Access Week goes into its fifth year in 2011, promoting Open Access as a new norm in scholarship and research. It takes place from October 24 to 30 in many places around the globe.

7 October 2011 - A huge leap forward for Open Science. This week’s news that researchers at Cern (European Organization for Nuclear Research) in Switzerland are publishing their results “so other scientists can determine if the approach contains any mistakes” represents a huge leap forward for Open Science.

6 October 2011 - Princeton University Faculty Commit to Open Access. In a meeting on Sept.19, 2011, Princeton’s faculty agreed to grant the university a “nonexclusive, irrevocable, worldwide license to exercise any and all copyrights in his or her scholarly articles published in any medium, whether now known or later invented, provided the articles are not sold by the University for a profit, and to authorize others to do the same.”

4 October 2011 - Hats off to the Global Text Project! The Global Text Project (globaltext.org) seeks to build a library of free online textbooks. Co-directors, Doctors Richard Watson from the University of Georgia and Donald McCubbrey from University of Denver, established the non-profit organization in 2006

24 September 2011 - Funding bodies stump up cash in open access agreement (THE) . Three European funding agencies (Germany’s Max Planck Society, the Austrian Science Fund, and Italian charity Telethon) have signed an open access funding agreement with journal publisher Wiley-Blackwell and will pay the open access fees of researchers they fund when they publish a paper in one of Wiley-Blackwell’s 1,500 journals.

23 September 2011 - Open science is a research accelerator (Nature Chemistry 3, 745–748). An open-source approach to the problem of producing an off-patent drug in enantiopure form serves as an example of how academic and industrial researchers can join forces to make new scientific discoveries that could have a huge impact on human health.

29 August 2011 - Academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist. Academic publishers charge vast fees to access research paid for by us. Down with the knowledge monopoly racketeers. George Monbiot, The Guardian

26 August 2011 - The Open Access Interviews: Wellcome Trust’s Robert Kiley speaking about how much Gold Open Access will eventually cost and how the research community will pay for it. Richard Poynder's blog.

1 August 2011 - The pros and perils of ditching academic publishers. Dorothy Bishop, Professor of Developmental Neuropsychology at University of Oxford blogs about current affairs in scholarly communication.

18 July 2011 - The UK Parliament’s Science and Technology Committee has produced a Report on “Peer review in scientific publications”. One recommendation of the Committee is that “data associated with publicly funded research should, where possible, be made widely and freely available”.

15 July 2011 - The European Commission has launched a public consultation on scientific information in the digital age. Press release. This consultation will be open until 9 September 2011.

21 June 2011 - Open access comes of age. Publishing model enters phase of slower but steady growth. Nature 474, 428 (2011).

13 June 2011 - Open Access policy at Karolinska Institutet. The Board of Research at KI has adopted an open access policy that encourages its researchers to make their publications to the greatest possible extent freely available taking into account publisher terms and relevant demands of grant-awarding bodies and government authorities.

12 June 2011 - The UK House of Commons Science & Technology Committee is currently conducting an inquiry into peer review. The third public event of the inquiry was held on Monday 23rd May, when the Committee heard evidence from experts on open access publishing and post-publication review, and from representatives of the research community. Summary and comments from Richard Poynder.

3 June 2011 - Open Access journals get impressive impact factors. Five journals published by BioMed Central received their first impact factors this year. BMC Bioinformatics, with an impact factor of 5.42, has reinforced its reputation as one of the top journals in its field.

2 June 2011 - Free for All: National Academies Press Puts All 4,000 Books Online at No Charge. The National Academies Press announced it would offer its entire PDF catalog of books for free, as files that can be downloaded by anyone. The press is the publishing arm of the National Academies of Sciences and Engineering, the Institute of Medicine, and the National Research Council, and publishes books and reports that scientists, educators, and policy makers rely on.

1 June 2011 - Springer offers free access to research articles on E. coli bacteria. Over 400 articles on the E. coli bacteria available online free of charge on SpringerLink

25 May 2011 - Research Councils UK and HEFCE work together on open access

10 May 2011 - Library of Congress announces the National Jukebox: Largest Collection of Recordings Ever Made Available To Public (Free). At launch Jukebox contains 10,000 recordings made by the Victor Talking Machine Company between 1901 and 1925. The Collection Also Includes Spoken Word Material including political speeches.

20 April 2011 - Public response on behalf of SPARC, SPARC Europe and COAR regarding publishers self-deposit policies. Universities and research funders have a strong interest in ensuring that the results of the research that they support are made available for use by the widest possible audience, with minimal time delays. One of the main methods used to support this interest is the deposit of articles into online repositories.[...] We join JISC and others in speaking out against this and any other practice that result in a lengthening of delays for accessing articles in repositories, and urge other organizations concerned with ensuring timely access to scholarly articles to do the same.

18 April 2011 - The architecture of access to scientific knowledge: just how badly we have messed this up. Lessig, Lawrence, CERN Colloquium and Library Science Talk. Professor Lessig reviews the evolution of access to scientific scholarship, and evaluate the success of this system of access against a background norm of universal access.While copyright battles involving artists has gotten most of the public's attention, the real battle should be over access to knowledge, not culture. That battle we are losing.

March 2011 - Academic Knowledge, Open Access and Democracy: A Call for Action. Arcadia has submitted a paper to the Hargreaves review on IP that presents an evidence-based case for Open Access. We believe that publicly-funded research should be available online and free for scholars and the public alike, and our paper recommends the steps needed to be taken by government for a fairer and more democratic access to knowledge. We have received significant support in our petition and are continuing to collect signatures of support until the end of March 2011. Please see the recommendations in the link above. To sign up please contact Dr Fay Bound Alberti, Arcadia's Head of Philanthropy and Grants Management at: fay.boundalberti@nyland.org.uk. Anne Jarvis, Librarian of Cambridge University Library, has signed the petition on behalf of the University Library

March 2011 - The world's largest peer-reviewed journal is now an OA journal, PLoS ONE.

31 March 2001 - The Publishers Association (PA) and Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) agrees that Open Access is "here to stay".

24 March 2011 - The Google Books Settlement: Where Things Stand, and Some Suggestions for What’s Next. David Crotty The Scholarly Kitchen

14 Mar 2011 - University Presses Are Urged to Work Together to Survive - The Chronicle of Higher Education. Summarise the findings of a report by the Association of American University Presses giving "a detailed snapshot of what approaches university presses are trying in this period of intense change in the scholarly communication ecosystem."

19 Jan 2011 - Atlas of an organism - sharing data successfully: "The comprehensive, interactive and freely accessible digital gene expression atlas (www.eurexpress.org) includes expression data for over 15,000 genes in hundreds of anatomical structures and led to the identification of tissue-specific and tissue-overlapping gene networks...."

13 Jan 2011 - Report from the SOAP Symposium (Study of Open Access Publishing). The project, which runs from March 2009 to February 2011 describes and analyses the open access (OA) publishing landscape and provides facts and evidence allowing libraries, publishers and funding agencies to assess drivers and barriers, risks and opportunities in the transition to OA publishing.

10 Jan 2011 - Global funding agencies commit to enhancing access to research data to improve public health. "Health research data must be made more widely available within the scientific community if we are to unlock the full potential of research and achieve significant advances in public health, according to leading funding agencies."

10 Jan 2011 - An Open, Digital Professoriat Inside Higher Ed, (10 Jan 2011) "In one session [the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association]..., scholars discussed their visions for an "open professoriat." ...Amanda French of the Center for New Media and History argued...that if scholars want their work read directly (as opposed to having secondhand accounts read) they need to work with open access journals....The reality, French argued, is that by opening up scholarship and sharing it online, scholars expand their base...."

28 Oct 2010 - Call for UK Sector to Unite behind Open Access. Press Release on the RLUK Website

19 October 2010 - Harvard Signs Budapest OA Initiative & Berlin Declaration. Harvard is committed to making research freely and widely available and working with other organizations to support this goal.

19 October 2010 - Is There an Open-Access Citation Advantage? An article in the Chronicle of Higher Education

18-24 October 2010 - International Open Access Week

28th September 2010 - Library cuts threaten research As journal cancellations sweep across the US, scientists worry about how they will affect research. The Scientist - Magazine of the Life Sciences

28 September 2010 - The Google Book Settlement as Copyright Reform. Pamela Samuelson, University of California, Berkeley - School of Law

12 August 2010 - Rare sharing of data led to results on Alzheimer’s. The New York Times

4 August 2010 - Confidentiality of PhD Theses in the UK: "The 2010 survey has revealed that, contrary to expectations, the number of requests to restrict access to PhD theses has not increased significantly since the original survey in 2004."

4 August 2010 - New study examines the economic returns of public access policies.

15 June 2010 - UUK Information event for senior university managers: The costs, benefits and implications for universities of open access to research outputs. Follow up workshops on The cost of open access? are held during July 2010.

11 June 2010 - A new case for open access publishing - to "break" Nature's monopoly. California Digital Library threatens boycott over Nature Publishing’s plans to raise prices. CDL letter to faculty . THE article.

6 June 2010 - Wittgenstein archives available on line. "The Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen has made 5,000 pages of Wittgenstein's writings available for open access on the website Wittgenstein Source." www.universityworldnews.com

10 May 2010 - US Scientists Seeking NSF Funding Will Soon Be Required to Submit Data Management Plans

23 Apr 2010 - A coalition of 27 of the United States’ leading research universities and colleges has issued an open letter calling for greatly increased public access to the results of research funded by major federal agencies.

28 Mar 2010 - US study found that placing books online for free download increased hard copy sales.

5 February 2010 - Online Guide to Open Access Journals Publishing Launches. Co-Action Publishing and Lund University Libraries Main Office announced the launch of the Online Guide to Open Access Journals Publishing at http://www.doaj.org/bpguide.

January 2010 - UUK SUPPORTS OPEN ACCESS FOR REF CONTENT. As part of the Universities UK response to HEFCE's consultation on the Research Excellence Framework, UUK's reponse contains the following endorsement of an open access approach to the assessment process: "UUK supports the move toward 'open access' of research outputs and, although not mentioned in the consultation, would encourage the REF guidance to require that all submitted outputs are available through some form of open access mechanism. This would build on good research and information management practice. Work currently being undertaken by JISC and other stakeholders can support this process."

Dec 2009 - Royal Holloway University issues UK's 32nd Green Open Access Mandate. The policy was approved by its Academic Board in December 2009 to commence 1st September 2010 along with a new research information system: "All journal articles... are to be self-archived in the University’s Digital Research Repository... Articles are to be submitted immediately upon acceptance for publication. The author's final accepted draft should be submitted."

From mid-December 2009 to mid-January 2010 the Obama Administration ran an open consultation on public access to federally-funded research outputs. Our US colleagues regard this initiative as very significant, the "Request for Information" procedure used signalling the Administration's serious interest in making a policy change. The consultation received a substantial response indicating the importance of access to US research for researchers working collaboratively world-wide and also mirrors the resonse to the European Commission's request for comment on open access in 2006. More information. Harvard response to White House RFI on public access policies January 22nd, 2010.

12 November 2009 - Learning to share, Times Higher article debating Open Access publishing models, the publishers' take on them and the ramifications for journal and book publications.

10 November 2009 - Open Science - the future for research? As part of JISC's 'Research 3.0 - driving the knowledge economy' activity which launches at the end of November, a new Open Science report released today trails key research trends that could have far-reaching implications for science, universities and UK society.

19-23 October 2009 - International Open Access Week sparked large numbers of events, announcements and similar awareness-raising activities including a series of events at the University of Cambridge. Highlights were Yale ISP Celebrating Open Access Week with New Research, the announcement of German Research Foundation Funding for University Author Funds, and a press release from the Wellcome Trust commenting on the Wellcome Trust wishing "to see a commitment from publishers to show the uptake of their open access option and to adjust their subscription rates to reflect increases in income from open access fees."

18 June 2009 - Time Higher reports on "Publisher 'threat' to open access"

16 June 2009 - Harvard's 4th Open Access mandate - The faculty of the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) voted overwhelmingly at its last faculty meeting to allow the university to make all faculty members' scholarly articles publicly available online.

4 June 2009 - University College London is set to become the first of the top tier of elite European universities to embrace open access with institution-wide mandate. The institution announced this week that all its researchers will have to deposit their papers in UCL's online repository, where they will be accessible free of charge.

30 April 2009 - A Times Higher Education (THE) writes that research councils are looking at what more they can do to support open access to research results

11 February 2009 Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), the last of the seven Research Councils UK has agreed to mandate open access publication to its researchers.

14 October 2008 sees the launch of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA). The mission of OASPA is to support and represent the interests of Open Access (OA) journals publishers globally in all scientific, technical, and scholarly disciplines through an exchange of information, setting of industry standards, advancing business and publishing models, advocating for gold OA journals publishing, education and the promotion of innovation.

Oct-Nov 2008 "A course in open access" - How the Open University is taking the publishers out of scholarly publishing. Computer Weekly

5 September 2008 Bloomsbury Publishing announced today that it is launching into academic publishing with a new imprint: Bloomsbury Academic. The imprint will be using a radically new model. All titles will be made available free of charge online, with free downloads, for non-commercial purposes, immediately upon publication, using Creative Commons licences. The works will also be sold as books, using latest short-run technologies or Print on Demand (POD).

In June 2008 Stanford University School of Education passed the Open Access Motion in a move designed to broaden access to faculty research and scholarship. The policy requires its faculty members to make their scholarly articles available for free to the public.

In May 2008 Harvard Law School adopted an open access publishing policy following Harvard University Faculty of Arts and Sciences' move from February 2008.

As from 7 April 2008 the NIH Public Access Policy requires scientists to submit journal articles that arise from NIH funds to the digital archive PubMed Central.

Six UK Research Councils (AHRC, BBSRC, ESRC, MRC, NERC, STFC) have to date made open access dissemination of research outputs a requirement of any grant.

From October 2006, the Wellcome Trust has required all Trust-funded researchers to make their peer-reviewed research papers available through PubMed Central (PMC). Read more on this issue on our funders' mandates page.

Three UK Universities have to date mandated the deposit of research publications into the Institutional Repositories (University of Stirling, University of Southampton, Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh).