By Nick
The Australian Research Council – which funds much of the scientific research carried out in Australia, handing out taxpayers money – has announced that, effective immediately, all ARC funded research publications should be made open access. Hooray!
Well, kind of. You are only obliged to publish this data if the journal involved allows you to. How many major journals do we envisage letting that happen? And if you’re already publishing in an open access journal, then you only have to provide a link.
To me, all this new policy really does is oblige scientists to keep their personal webpages up to date, to include links to their work, whether open access or behind the paywall. And also to email this link to some internal university administrator so that they can put it on a centralised web-page.
Still, its a start.
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For more information on the pros and cons of this new policy, read see The Conversation‘s piece.
I don’t know a whole lot about Aaron Swartz, but news reports say he committed suicide after being caught downloading volumes of academic journals with the intention of distributing them freely on the internet. Seems that open access is very topical at the moment.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-01-13/reddit-co-founder-aaron-swartz-dies/4462728
Aaron Swartz was the founder of Reddit, created RSS, developed the creative commons law and led the anti-SOPA cause. He was a pioneer of freedom of information on the internet. The man was basically a genius and a fighter for the greater good. JSTOR, to their credit, dropped their court-case against him. But the US Public Prosecutor did not, hounded and harassed him and labelled him a terrorist. They effectively persecuted a man to his death for distributing academic journals. It is incredibly tragic.