Technology Blog

Gretchen Vogel and Martin Enserink, Europe Steps Into the Open With Plans for Electronic Archives, Science Magazine, April 29, 2005 (accessible only to subscribers). Excerpt: ‘While moves in the United States to make scientific research results available –for free– at the click of a mouse have generated intense debate, European research organizations have quietly been forging ahead. Slowly but surely, they are starting to build and connect institutional and even nationwide public archives that will, according to proponents, be the megalibraries of the future, allowing anyone with an Internet connection to access papers that result from publicly funded research. “The cutting edge of the Open Access movement is now in Europe,” says Peter Suber of Public Knowledge, an advocacy group in Washington, D.C….London’s Wellcome Trust, for example, has taken one of the strongest public-access positions worldwide. The U.K.’s largest funder of biomedical research is planning to launch a system that will archive all papers produced by its grantees. Wellcome will require researchers to deposit a copy of the accepted manuscript within 6 months of publication. That goes much further than the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, which decided to “strongly encourage,” but not require, grant recipients to post their papers in the U.S. National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central within 12 months of publication….”We are certainly very interested in what Wellcome is doing,” says Anthony Peatf ield of the [UK Medical Research Council]. The seven U.K. Research Councils plan to announce their own publicaccess policy next month, which is expected to ask grant recipients to deposit their papers in an archive maintained either by their own institution or, if available, a centralized one like U.K. PubMed Central. Similar projects are under way in France, Germany, and the Netherlands. The continent’s open-access advocates got a boost in October 2003, when members of several of Europe’s leading scientific organizations signed the so-called Berlin Declaration. It says that authors should retain rights to their papers –including the right to distribute electronic copies freely– and that all papers should be deposited in a public archive.’