Open Access - UK

["Klaus Graf" <klaus.graf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee
released the long-awaited report on its inquiry into
journal prices and open access, Scientific Publications:
Free for All? Here's my summary of the major
recommendations:

The government should provide funds for all UK universities
to launch open-access institutional repositories. 
Authors of articles based on government-funded research
should deposit copies in their institutional repositories. 
The government should appoint a "central body" to oversee
the launch of the institutional repositories, their
networking needs, and their compliance with "technical
standards needed to provide maximum functionality"
(presumably the OAI metadata harvesting protocol). 
The government should create a fund to help authors pay the
processing fees charged by open-access journals. The
committee is not yet ready to endorse the upfront funding
model for OA journals (which it calls the "author-pays"
model), but wants to create such a fund in order to promote
further experimentation with the model. 
The government should develop a wider, long-term
open-access strategy, including open-access journals, "as a
matter of urgency". 
Universities should develop their "capacity to manage" the
copyrights that faculty will increasingly retain in the
future. 
These steps can and should be undertaken without
jeopardizing "rigorous and independent peer review". 
The government should fund the British Library to take on
the long-term preservation of digital scholarship. 
Because the market for science and scholarship is
international, the government should "act as a proponent
for change on the international stage and lead by example".

Zusammenfassung von Peter Suber
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html

Klaus Graf