CERN reaffirms commitment to open access
At a meeting on 20 March, CERN's Executive Committee endorsed a policy of open access to all of the laboratory's results, as expressed in the document "Continuing CERN Action on Open Access" released by its Scientific Information Policy Board (SIPB) earlier in the month. Today open access to scientific knowledge is the goal of an increasingly large component of the scientific community worldwide. Made possible by new electronic tools, it is a concept that would bring enormous benefits to all scientists by giving them free access to research results.
CERN has implicitly supported this principle from the very beginning. The organization's Convention, adopted in 1953 by the 12 founding member states, stipulates that "...the results of its experimental and theoretical work shall be published or otherwise made generally available". However, it is only in recent years that the technology has been developed to enable this aim to be achieved in practice.
The recent endorsement by the Executive Board follows earlier steps CERN has taken - signing the Berlin Declaration on open access in May 2004 at a meeting at CERN (Berlin 2), and, most recently, presenting its plan at a meeting in Southampton in February (Berlin 3). This meeting passed a resolution that closely matches the steps advocated by CERN, calling on research institutions to adopt the two essential features of the open-access movement. These are implementing policies requiring their researchers to deposit each published article in a freely accessible electronic repository, and encouraging their researchers to publish their research in open-access journals, including providing the support so this changeover can take place.
The ever-increasing cost of traditional scientific publishing is another incentive towards changing the publishing model. The CERN Library is currently unable to offer complete coverage of even its core subjects.
• For the document "Continuing CERN Action on Open Access" see http://doc.cern.ch/archive/electronic/cern/preprints/open/open-2005-006.pdf. For more about the Berlin Declaration see www.zim.mpg.de/openaccess-berlin/berlindeclaration.html.
CCLRC sets up e-publishing archive
The UK's Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils (CCLRC) has introduced an electronic-publications archive, which currently contains bibliographic entries for 21,000 publications produced by CCLRC in its various historical forms since 1965.
The e-pubs archive is not intended to replace or duplicate the 500,000 records in the well known SPIRES database of high-energy physics literature, but to complement it by providing access to publications from the CCLRC laboratories at Daresbury, Rutherford-Appleton and Chilbolton. These publications cross a range of disciplines related to particle physics.
At present only a test sample of 400 eprints has been included. However, there are plans to include eprints in the archive of past reports produced by CCLRC, as well as future publications where copyright agreements with publishers permit it. Where eprints cannot be placed in the archive, but the publisher of an article has placed it online elsewhere, e-pubs stores digital-object identifiers that point to the online article, making it a gateway to the online libraries of many publishers.
Unlike many online bibliographies and digital libraries, the CCLRC e-pubs system takes advantage of the generic Web search engines as well as tools directed at academics and researchers. It presents its contents to be harvested either as text or through the protocols of the Open Archive Initiatives (OAI). Eprints thus enjoy far greater visibility than they might otherwise have had.
• CCLRC's e-pubs system can be found at http://epubs.cclrc.ac.uk/index. To find out more information about the OAI see www.openarchives.org/.