Elsevier, Others Asked To Provide Research Info Online For Free

The open-access debate has blown up again (this time on the author self-archiving side), after being quiet for some time: Scientific research funded by the European taxpayer should be freely available online, according to a European commission report produced by economists from Toulouse University and the Free University of Brussels.
The research shows that in the 20 years to 1995 the price of scientific journals rose 300% more than the rate of inflation over the period. In the 10 years since then, price increases slowed but still significantly outpaced inflation.
The report recommends open access to publicly funded research. It proposes that researchers who receive EU funding should be “mandated” to place copies of articles published in subscription journals on web-based archives that can be accessed by everyone for free.
The worry for traditional publishers such as Reed, Springer, Blackwell and the hundreds of learned societies that make their money through journals, is that if research is available for free on the internet no one will pay subscriptions.
Guardian II: Reed’s scientific journals arm accounts for about a third of the group’s underlying profits, according to analysts’ estimates, so any threat to its market-leading position is eyed nervously by investors. Google Scholar, which collates academic material, including scientific research, and publishes it on the web for free, is one of those nascent threats. Another threat emerged last week when Microsoft launched its Windows Live Academic Research. The scientific community has worked closely with Microsoft to develop the service, which uses papers and search terms from the publishers themselves to produce its index.

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