Researcher Support for Open Access to Research

Dear Colleagues, The European Commission, the European Research Advisory Board and the European Research Councils have recently each recommended adopting the policy of providing Open Access to research results: http://europa.eu.int/comm/research/science-society/pdf/scientific-publicati… http://ec.europa.eu/research/eurab/pdf/eurab_scipub_report_recomm_dec06_en.… http://erc.europa.eu/pdf/open-access.pdf (Very similar recommendations are also being made by governmental research organisations in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Asia.) There are non-research interests strongly lobbying against these recommendations, so a display of support by the research community is critically important. A consortium of European organisations working in the scholarly communication arena is now sponsoring a petition to the European Commission to demonstrate support for these recommendations on the part of the European and worldwide research community. Signatures may be added by individual researchers or universities and research institutions. I would strongly urge you to register your support. To sign the petition, please go to: http://www.ec-petition.eu/ The sponsoring organisations are JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee, UK), SURF (Netherlands), SPARC Europe, DFG (Deutsches Forschungsgemeinschaft, Germany), DEFF (Danmarks Elektroniske Fag- og Forskningsbibliotek, Denmark). Many thanks and best wishes, Stevan Harnad Chaire de recherche du Canada Professor of Cognitive Science Ctr. de neuroscience de la cognition Dpt. Electronics & Computer Science Université du Québec à Montréal University of Southampton Montréal, Québec Highfield, Southampton Canada H3C 3P8 SO17 1BJ United Kingdom http://www.crsc.uqam.ca/ http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/