Open Access to Science and Research

Open Access to Science and Research

Confirmed Speakers

Leslie Chan, University of Toronto and Bioline International
Subbiah Arunachalam, Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, India.
Eve Gray, Centre for Educational Technology, UCT
DK Sahu, Medknow Publications Pvt. Ltd. 
Moderating: Peter Suber, Earlham, SPARC and Yale Information Society Project

Wednesday, 10 September, 14h00 - 15h30

Open access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of unnecessary copyright and licensing restrictions.  Made possible by the internet and author consent, OA supports wider and faster access to knowledge.  It's a distant dream for most kinds of literature, where authors are unwilling to give up the revenue they currently earn from publishers.  But it's growing quickly for scholarly journal articles, where journals don't pay for articles and authors write for impact, not for money.  The result is a revolutionary opportunity to accelerate research and share knowledge. OA is especially important for researchers and medical practitioners in developing countries, where access to knowledge has been sharply reduced by four decades of fast-rising journal prices.

This panel will examine what universities and governments can do to promote OA, with a special focus on medical research and health information. Among the models discussed will be peer-reviewed OA journals, OA repositories, the WHO's Health InterNetwork Access to Research Initiative (HINARI), and the new policy from the U.S. National Institutes of Health requiring NIH-funded researchers to deposit their peer-reviewed manuscripts in an OA repository.

The questions to be addressed will include:

• How do access barriers slow research in developing countries?  How does OA remove those barriers?
• What can universities do to promote OA?
• What can governments, and public funding agencies, do to promote OA?
• What special challenges do developing countries face in providing OA?
• What are some concrete examples of successful OA policies and projects in developing countries?
• Why is OA a critical issue for policy-makers concerned with public health, scientific innovation, and higher education?
• How does OA accelerate the advance and spread of knowledge in medicine as well as in other disciplines?
• How can OA promote the work of researchers in developing and transitional countries, both as readers and as authors?