I’ve started tinkering with Linux, after finding that Mandrakesoft Move didn’t present too many problems. Reading about GNU GPLs lead me onto Richard Stallman’s page. All good, and included a link to a NIH proposal to…

request that its grantees and supported Principal Investigators provide the NIH with electronic copies of all final version manuscripts upon acceptance for publication if the research was supported in whole or in part by NIH funding

You can read the proposal here, and if you agree with it, I encourage you to show your support by contacting NIH.

It seems that there’s a move to support OAIs in the UK, but that a number of factors are holding it back (see Frederik J. Friend’s presentations here and here), e.g. the RAE:


*In principle any published work can be submitted as part of the RAE
*In practice the perception (and the unofficial reality) is that the members of the RAE subject panels only look favourably upon journal articles published in high impact factor journals
*This situation is causing UK authors to hold back from submission to OA journals until their impact factor is proven
*JISC / OSI author survey showed that a high percentage of authors are supportive of OA in principle but are worried about the effect on their career and research grant prospects if they try OA
*This culture will change in time as more high-quality OA journals appear but currently it is holding back OA

Fred Friend’s advice on the UCL scholarly communication page is also well worth a look.

I am sure it’s naive, but it does seem to me that HEFCE have, through the RAE, the means of reshaping the playing field. Couldn’t they just give additional weighting to publications in OA journals? I really don’t know enough about the RAE to know if that is feasible, or whether just insisting any research council funded research must be placed in an OA repository withing a certain period after publication is more workable. I did speak to my supervisor about how a cartel of likeminded researchers could ‘fix it’ for particular fields of work, using the means laid out in John Baez’s site, but he pointed out that the costs to those involved would be high.