Issues in Scholarly Communication is a newsletter produced by Paula Kaufman, University Librarian and Dean of Libraries, for the Illinois community. Entries from 2001-2005 newsletter are available.
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The UK is losing nearly £1.5 billion every year in the potential effect of scientific research expenditure in the country, says Professor Stevan Harnad, Moderator of the American Scientist Open Access Forum and Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of Southampton's School of Electronics and Computer Science. He has estimated the potential earnings on the investment in scientific research that are lost due to the existing academic publishing environment. Though Research Councils UK’s (RCUK) £3.5 billion annual funding leads to the publication of nearly 130,000 articles, that does not fully represent the return on invesment for the UK Government, adds the professor. For research papers to attain value there must be further usage, application and value addition. The research/citation impact - the number of times an article is cited by other articles – must be measured, he opines. In his article titled ‘Maximising the Return on UK's Public Investment Research’(http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11220), Harnad contends that there is a certain loss of citation impacts owing to the inaccessibility of UK research papers. The online environment has enabled authors to self-archive their works or place them in institutional repositories that can be viewed for free. Supporting RCUK’s policy of free access to research papers, Harnad says that the online era is an opportunity to maximise the earnings on public investment in research studies.
From: KnowledgeSpeak, 9/16/05, http://www.knowledgespeak.com/news.asp#4
Posted by at September 16, 2005 1:38 PM
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