To all participants of the InterAcademy Panel on International Issues meeting taking place in Mexico, 1-5 December 2003 http://www4.nas.edu/IAP/IAPhome.nsf/weblinks/MGLY-4VQVBB
Dear Academicians: Scientists around the world are greatly concerned about the increasing difficulties we face in the matter of accessing information relevant to our research. Journal prices are soaring and even libraries in industrialised countries are forced to cut down on the number of journals they subscribe to. The situation in developing countries including India is much worse. It is for this reason, the Open Access movement is gaining ground. Both BioMed Central and the Public Library of Science are publishing many open access journals. Even in India the Indian Academy of Sciences makes all its 11 journals available free on the Web. But to date only about 600 journals (of about 24,000 refereed scholarly journals) are available for universal free access. Therefore, in addition to promoting open access journals, we need to promote interoperable (OAI-compliant) institutional self archiving of research papers, as suggested by Stevan Harnad. Learned Academies and governments around the world should proactively persuade scientists and scientific institutions around the world, and especially in their home countries, to set up institutional archives and to sign the Berlin Declaration. It is now well understood that research papers which are available on the web are far more visible and cited than papers published in toll access journals. Therefore it is in the interest of the individual scientists, their institutions and funding agencies to promote open access. Please use your collective might as the world's leading academicians to influence governments, donor agencies, vice chancellors of universities and directors of research laboratories around the world to proactively promote open access in their home countries. The WSIS meeting at Geneva in the second week of December provides an opportunity to obtain a worldwide agreement on this important issue. We seek your support. If you are at WSIS, please attend the session on "Open Access to Scientific Information: Revolution in Science or Inevitable Scientific Evolution?" Thursday, 11 December 2003, 1700 - 2000 hrs, Room T, CERN. http://www.wsis-online.net/smsi/classes/smsi/events/smsi-events-85268/event-view?referer=/event/events-list?showall=t Regards. Arun [Subbiah Arunachalam]
