Here is a press release on a meeting to be held in Geneva on 11 December 2003.
World Summit on the Information Society
http://www.itu.int/wsis/
Open Access Side-Event:
http://www.wsis-online.net/smsi/classes/smsi/events/smsi-events-85268/event-view?referer=/event/events-list?showall=t
"A growing number of scientists worldwide are actively promoting
'open access' to the scientific literature. This means toll-free
online access to the full-texts of all refereed research articles. At
present, except the fraction of articles for which a suitable
open-access journal already exists today (<5%), research is only
accessible if the researcher's institution can afford to pay for the
toll-access journal in which it is published (>95%). As a result,
most of the potential users of research -- and especially those in
developing countries -- are unable to access most research. This
represents a great loss to both research-providers and
research-users, and hence to the progress and benefits of
research itself. Fortunately, the Internet and Web technologies
have at last opened up the possibility for those researchers
whose institutions cannot afford the toll-access version of any
article to use instead the open-access version, self-archived on the
author's own institutional website. The provision of open access to
their own refereed research output by researchers and their
institutions needs systematic worldwide promotion. We are holding
a three-hour meeting on open-access provision at Geneva as a side
event at WSIS. Please publicise the meeting. More important, read
and write about the substantial contribution of open access to the
progress and benefits of science."
(For some useful information:
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/ )
Subbiah Arunachalam
Received on Tue Dec 02 2003 - 12:54:20 GMT