Washington DC Principles for Free Access to Science

(Forwarded from American Scientist Open Access Forum)

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Washington DC Principles for Free Access to Science
Date: Tue, 16 Mar 2004 20:24:00 +0000
From: Stevan Harnad <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]

Forty-eight non-profit publishers of 380 journals each year, representing
more than 600,000 members and posting 800,000 articles on line each year,
of which more than 440,000 are free have today (Mar 16 2004) signed the
"Washington DC Principles for Free Access to Science," whose gist is:

    Selected important articles of interest are free online from the
    time of publication;

    The full text of our journals is freely available to everyone
    worldwide either immediately or within months of publication,
    depending on each publisher's business and publishing requirements;

    The content of our journals is available free to scientists working
    in many low-income nations;

    http://www.dcprinciples.org/

This is a very welcome step, and if these publishers' policy on the 50%
of their articles that are not immediately free is "green" (i.e., their
authors are welcome to self-archive them) then one could not ask for more!

http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ls/disresearch/romeo/Romeo%20Publisher%20Policies.htm

Stevan Harnad

NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open
access to the peer-reviewed research literature online (1998-2004)
is available at the American Scientist Open Access Forum:
        To join the Forum:
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html
        Post discussion to:
    [email protected]
        Hypermail Archive:
    http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html

Unified Dual Open-Access-Provision Policy:
    BOAI-2 ("gold"): Publish your article in a suitable open-access
            journal whenever one exists.
            http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#journals
    BOAI-1 ("green"): Otherwise, publish your article in a suitable
            toll-access journal and also self-archive it.
            http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/
    http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml
    http://www.eprints.org/signup/