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A new model for scientific production, publishing and access are
emerging in the new environment of the networked society, in the
free culture that flourish in this commons built by the Internet.
This developments preserve the public domain of knowledge "for the
benefit of scientific progress, education and the public good."
In this trend we can found recent initiatives such as the Public
Library of Science, the Petition to Public Funding Agencies: Support
Open Source Software or the Budapest Open Access Initiative.
The Public Library of Science is a grassroots initiative by scientists.
"The Public Library of Science is a non-profit organization of scientists
committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature
freely accessible to scientists and to the public around the world,
for the benefit of scientific progress, education and the public
good. We are working for the establishment of international online
public libraries of science that will archive and distribute the
complete contents of published scientific articles, and foster the
development of new ways to search, interlink and integrate the information
that is currently partitioned into millions of separate reports
and segregated into thousands of different journals, each with its
own restrictions on access."
Since their published open letter to support the establishment
of an international online public library on medicine and the life
sciences, more than 29,630 scientists from 175 countries have signed
it. "To encourage the publishers of our journals to support this
endeavor, we pledge that, beginning in September, 2001, we will
publish in, edit or review for, and personally subscribe to, only
those scholarly and scientific journals that have agreed to grant
unrestricted free distribution rights to any and all original research
reports that they have published, through PubMed Central and similar
online public resources, within 6 months of their initial publication
date." Now some journals adopted the policies they advocate, "however,
the resistance this initiative has met from most of the scientific
publishers has made it clear that if we really want to change the
publication of scientific research, we must do the publishing ourselves.
It is now time for us to work together to create the journals we
have called for." So they will launch early next year new scientific
journals that will publish peer-reviewed scientific research reports
online with no restrictions on access or distribution. Articles
published by the forthcoming journals will be released under terms
of a new *Public
Library of Science Open Access License*, analogous to the way
in which open source software is produced. The costs of peer review,
editorial oversight and publication will be recovered primarily
by charges to authors (approximately $300 per published article;
costs will be subsidized for authors who can not afford these charges.)"
>from *The
Public Library of Science site*
"Software funded by publically-funded research should be released
under Open Source or Free Software licenses. This will benefit the
public by promoting both the pace and progress of science by encouraging
open and verifiable peer-reviewed research and the reuse of previously
reviewed software. Software plays a large and growing role in scientific
research. Modern science uses software to simulate complex systems,
collect data, and to analyze the results of experiments. We feel
that public distribution and critical examination of software source
code are critical to the progress of science. We believe that researchers
supported by publically-funded grant agencies should be required,
as a condition on funding, to publish any source code under an Open
Source or a Free Software license. Such licensing is the software
equivalent of peer-reviewed publication of research results. The
first obvious benefit of mandatory software source release is a
speedup of software development. The longer-term benefit is that
the software can be studied and reviewed in the same way as the
other parts of scientific research." >from *Petition
to Public Funding Agencies: Support Open Source Software*, september
24, 2001.
"An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible
an unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the willingness
of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research
in scholarly journals without payment, for the sake of inquiry and
knowledge. The new technology is the internet. The public good they
make possible is the world-wide electronic distribution of the peer-reviewed
journal literature and completely free and unrestricted access to
it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious
minds... Open access to peer-reviewed journal literature is the
goal. Self-archiving and a new generation of open-access alternative
journals are the ways to attain this goal... The Open Society Institute,
the foundation network founded by philanthropist George Soros, is
committed to providing initial help and funding to realize this
goal [ with a $3m grant ] ... We invite governments, universities,
libraries, journal editors, publishers, foundations, learned societies,
professional associations, and individual scholars who share our
vision to join us in the task of removing the barriers to open access
and building a future in which research and education in every part
of the world are that much more free to flourish." >from
*Budapest
Open Access Initiative*, february 14, 2002
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