Researcher Support Needed for Open Access to Research

I know this is not about Web IR - but it is important to show we care about
what, where, and how we publish.
Einat
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Dear Colleagues,

The European Commission, the European Research Advisory Board and the
European Research Councils have recently each recommended adopting the
policy of providing Open Access to research results:


http://europa.eu.int/comm/research/science-society/pdf/scientific-publication-study_en.pdf


http://ec.europa.eu/research/eurab/pdf/eurab_scipub_report_recomm_dec06_en.pdf

    http://erc.europa.eu/pdf/open-access.pdf

(Very similar recommendations are also being made by governmental research
organisations in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Asia.)

There are non-research interests strongly lobbying against these
recommendations, so a display of support by the research community is
critically important.

A consortium of European organisations working in the scholarly
communication arena is now sponsoring a petition to the European Commission
to demonstrate support for these recommendations on the part of the
European and worldwide research community.

Signatures may be added by individual researchers or universities and
research institutions.

I would strongly urge you to register your support. To sign the petition,
please go to:

    http://www.ec-petition.eu/

The sponsoring organisations are JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee,
UK), SURF (Netherlands), SPARC Europe, DFG (Deutsches
Forschungsgemeinschaft, Germany), DEFF (Danmarks Elektroniske Fag- og
Forskningsbibliotek, Denmark).

Many thanks and best wishes,

Stevan Harnad
Chaire de recherche du Canada                                Professor of
Cognitive Science
Ctr. de neuroscience de la cognition             Dpt. Electronics &
Computer Science
Université du Québec à Montréal
University of Southampton
Montréal, Québec
       Highfield, Southampton
Canada  H3C 3P8
                   SO17 1BJ United Kingdom
http://www.crsc.uqam.ca/
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/