Science Commons Announcements

["Donna Wentworth" <dwentworth AT creativecommons.org>]

As Harvard goes…

February 15th, 2008 by dwentworth

…so goes the University of Oregon — and, we hope, many other institutions of higher learning in the US and internationally.

As the wonderful Peter Suber and Gavin Baker have been reporting extensively at Open Access News, Harvard's decision to adopt an open access policy is causing a tremendous stir of excitement in the media and blogosphere. We at Science Commons are especially excited to learn that one day after the Harvard vote, the University of Oregon adopted a resolution in support of open access — including recommending that when faculty members sign a copyright transfer agreement for their work, they include an addendum to retain their rights, such as our Science Commons addenda.

We agree with BioMed Central president Matt Cockerill: the failure of traditional scientific publishing to make full use of the Internet's potential is an issue that's no longer of interest only to "librarians or activists." If you work at a university and would like to help speed the pace of discovery by promoting open access to scientific research, we encourage you to take a look at our Scholar's Copyright Addendum Engine (SCAE) and talk to your administrators about making it available to researchers on your university site.

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Donna Wentworth
Communications Specialist
Science Commons

http://sciencecommons.org
dwentworth AT creativecommons.org
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