[Insight-developers] IEEE Publishers and Open Access

[Luis Ibanez]

 From "The Institute", publication of IEEE:


"Information Free-for-All?"
BY TRUDY E. BELL

"If open access —a movement gaining momentum in academic publishing that
proposes journal articles be made universally available online to all
readers for free—becomes reality, the results could dramatically reshape
the activities of all scholarly publishers, including the IEEE.

Three events last year rocketed open access from the realm of the
hypothetical to that of a hard-nosed practical concern. In July the
British House of Commons published a 114-page examination of academic
publishing, which took to task well-known publishers (though not the
IEEE) for charging libraries annual subscription rates of up to US $30
000 for a single journal. The Commons recommended that “all [United
Kingdom] higher education institutions establish institutional
repositories in which their published output can be stored and from
which it can be read, free of charge, online.”

In November Google launched www.scholar.google.com, a search engine that
makes it easier to find academic publications in higher-education
repositories as well as in researchers’ private Web sites. And finally,
in December, U.S. President George W. Bush signed into law an
appropriations bill for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that
included the request that authors deposit a digital copy of the final
version of a peer-reviewed journal article resulting from NIH-sponsored
research into the NIH’s public depository, PubMed Central. These
documents would be freely available no more than six months after the
article is published in a paid-subscription journal. (Anyone wanting the
information immediately would still have to pay for a journal
subscription.) This request affects the IEEE, whose biomedical
technology journals publish some NIH-sponsored research.

“Good or bad, open access is happening,” declares John Vig, IEEE’s 2005
Vice President of Technical Activities and the past chair of the
Technical Activities Board’s Strategic Planning and Review Committee.
“It’s not a matter of ‘if,’ but ‘when.’”


(Full version at:)
http://boldfish.ieee.org/u/openacc7d/41569810