EUA procuram fazer a ciência gratuita para todos

Published online 7 April 2010 | Nature 464, 822-823 (2010) | doi:10.1038/464822a

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US seeks to make science free for all

Moves to make research funded by the US government available to everyone could mark a turning point in a publishing revolution. Declan Butler reports.

Declan Butler

The push to open up scientific knowledge to all looks set to go into overdrive. Over the past decade, the accessibility offered by the Internet has transformed science publishing. Several efforts have already tried to harness the web's power to make research papers available for free. Now two parallel efforts from the US government could see almost all federally funded research made available in free, publicly accessible repositories.

Harvard University is part of a group seeking ways to bolster open access to research papers.

M. FEIN/BLOOMBERG/GETTY IMAGES

Traditional science publishing relies on institutions and libraries buying subscriptions and site licences to academic journals. Some 'open-access' publishers, such as the non-profit Public Library of Science (PLoS), make papers free to readers immediately and try to cover the costs of peer review and publication by charging authors a fee. But author-pays business models are still in their infancy, and the papers they produce account for only a fraction of the literature.

The US government and many other research funders are largely taking a different tack — one that can instantly make huge numbers of scientific articles publicly available after a certain delay. Increasingly, they are making it a condition of funding that when scientists publish in a peer-reviewed subscription journal they must place of copy of their paper in a free, publicly accessible database. Such archives, however, mostly contain the authors' final version of the manuscript rather than the published, version of record available on the publisher's website.

The argument that everyone should have free access to the fruits of taxpayer-funded research has proved popular with lawmakers keen to reap the benefits of investment in science. And distributing results as widely as possible is predicted to produce socioeconomic gains, such as helping doctors keep up with medical research.

"The notion of open government and open access has taken a firm hold," says John Hawley, executive director of the American Society for Clinical Investigation in Ann Arbor, Michigan. "If that means public-access mandates, so be it."

Public access was boosted in late 2007, when the US Congress passed a bill making it compulsory for scientists funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to deposit their papers in the agency's PubMed Central archive within 12 months of publication.

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Read more here/Leia mais aqui: Nature

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NOTA DESTE BLOGGER:

Esta moda deve ser imitada aqui no Brasil, e se vier será muito bem vinda: o pesquisador usou dinheiro público [até na sua formação acadêmica], QED: a pesquisa é do povo!