I always used to bugger off dinner-time or find some unused classroom if
it was raining. Is this some trick to get us dodgers to play catch-up?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/01...emic_research/

The situation can be rather simplistically described as follows: The
more prestigious a journal, the more important it is for scientists that
their work is published in that journal. This means that the best work
goes to few journals, whose publishers have free rein to charge what
they like for subscriptions. But not many people can afford to subscribe
to journals that can cost over £2,000 per year, each.

In addition, once the article is accepted and published, the journals
own the copyright. Unravel this one: we have a situation where
government-funded research is being published in proprietary journals.
For other public bodies to subsequently access this research, more
government funding is needed pay for subscriptions to these same
journals.

The House of Commons reports says the Institutional Repositories such as
the one being permanently funded at Southampton, will "help improve
access to journals, but a more radical solution may be required in the
long term". The report points out that re-publishing papers accepted for
publication in journals does have copyright implications - although at
the beginning of the enquiry, 83 per cent of publishers did allow
authors to self-archive after publication. This figure has now risen to
93 per cent.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/01/25/iop_archive/

Universities are to get free access to the Institute of Physics' digital
journal-archives, a collection of scientific research spanning more than
100 years of publishing. The archive holds more than 110,000 articles
and 1.5m pages of physics research including papers by Sir John Fleming,
Sir Ernest Rutherford, Niels Bohr, Lord Rayleigh and Sir Edward
Appleton.

The access is made possible through a special agreement between the
Institute of Physics (IoP) and the Joint Information Systems Committee
(JISC). It will make some of the most important discoveries in physics
available for free for the first time, including the Nobel Prize-winning
work of Rutherford, in which he laid out the basis of the physics of
radioactivity.



--
Posted via Mailgate.ORG Server - http://www.Mailgate.ORG