Invitation to Sign Petition for Open Access
Dear SPARC Members and Friends, [University of Iowa Libraries is a member of SPARC, Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition]
Please join SPARC, SPARC Europe, and the sponsors of the petition below in support of free and open access to research in Europe. Signatures from around the world are invited and, in fact, needed to demonstrate the breadth of support and collaborative nature of research.
In the wake of the publication of the report from the “EU Study on the Economic and Technical Evolution of the Scientific Publication Markets of Europe” a consortium of organisations working in the scholarly communication arena is sponsoring a petition to the European Commission to demonstrate support for Open Access and for the recommendations in the report. Signatures may be added on behalf of individuals or institutions.
Please register your support for Open Access in this way. 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).
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Jennifer McLennan
Director of Communications
SPARC
(202) 296-2296 ext. 121
(202) 872-0884 Fax
http://www.arl.org/sparc
The European Commission Petition and the EC Poll Indicate Strong Support
The European research and academic community has demonstrated overwhelming support for the European Commission’s proposed Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate (A1). A petition, launched jointly on January 14th 2007 by research organisations in a number of European countries, has drawn over 20,000 signatures from Europe and worldwide in support of the EC’s proposal. The response includes almost 1,000 institutional signatories from National Academies of Sciences, Universities, Rectors’ conferences, Learned Societies, national and private research funding councils, and industries that apply research.)
In conjunction with the petition, a separate poll has been conducted of the EC Open Access Mandate’s specific target constituency. The administrators of currently active EU FP6 projects were asked to register a vote FOR or AGAINST open access to research results. The result was overwhelming: 85.8% in favour of open access, 14.2% against (based on a healthy 8.22% response rate from 2652 email invitations to vote).
Previous research has demonstrated the increased impact that Open Access to Research Results offers the research industry.
The petition and the poll demonstrate that Open Access now receives broad-based and popular support as a mainstream requirement of the European research industry.
[Les Carr, posted to American Scientist Open Access Forum, 14 Feb 2007]
