More moves towards universal open access
October 5, 2011
Two things to briefly report.
First, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council has just announced its new policy that “all published EPSRC-funded research articles submitted for publication from 1 September 2011 must be made available on an Open Access basis”. This policy brings EPSRC in line with other UK Research Councils (EPSRC is one of seven), the Wellcome Trust, and US funding bodies such as the NSF and NIH. Excellent news.
Second,an interesting paper entitled The Inevitability of Open Access has been accepted at College and Research Libraries, and is freely available as a preprint. It looks at trends in the prevalence of OA and extrapolates them to conclude that “Gold OA could account for 50% of the scholarly journal articles sometime between 2017 and 2021, and 90% of articles as soon as 2020 and more conservatively by 2025.”
… and in unrelated news, I just read this outstanding post about dinosaur butts over on Heinrich Mallison’s blog: throught-provoking, and well illustrated. Everyone who reconstructs dinosaurs should read it.
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week 
October 5, 2011 at 10:52 am
Seems to me the current Dinosaur Revolution is Open Access…
October 5, 2011 at 12:15 pm
Wow, that is excellent news! Shiny digital future, here we come…. well, crawl. I’m waiting to see how long it takes the German Science Foundation to get on board.
and many thanks for the link love – I try to go more text-heavy ;)
October 5, 2011 at 12:17 pm
Had you heard that Princeton University is encouraging its faculty to publish in open-access journals? Well, sort of. Kind of. In a way.
http://theconversation.edu.au/princeton-goes-open-access-to-stop-staff-handing-all-copyright-to-journals-unless-waiver-granted-3596
October 25, 2011 at 12:21 am
[…] slides. Then we got distracted and posted a whole sequence of articles on Open Access ([1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6]). If that seems like an intimidating sequence to catch up, you should just read […]