Hi, On Fri, 12 Oct 2001, Michael Jordan wrote: > The forty people whose names appear below have resigned from the > Editorial Board of the Machine Learning Journal (MLJ). We would
You may already know, or if not, find this initiative interesting -Jaak Vilo http://www.publiclibraryofscience.org/ The Public Library of Science is a non-profit organization of scientists committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature freely accessible to scientists and to the public around the world, for the benefit of scientific progress, education and the public good. We are working for the establishment of international online public libraries of science that will archive and distribute the complete contents of published scientific articles, and foster the development of new ways to search, interlink and integrate the information that is currently partitioned into millions of separate reports and segregated into thousands of different journals, each with its own restrictions on access. As a step toward these goals, scientists around the world have been circulating an open letter urging publishers to allow the research reports that have appeared in their journals to be distributed freely by independent, online public libraries of science. The response from the international scientific community to this initiative has been remarkable, and overwhelmingly positive. The open letter has now been signed by 28239 of your colleagues from 172 countries. Our initiative has prompted some significant and welcome steps by many scientific publishers towards freer access to published research, but in general these steps have fallen short of the reasonable policies we have advocated. We will make every effort to publish our work in, and give our full support to, those journals that have adopted the policy proposed in the open letter. It is now clear, however, that if we really want to change the publication of scientific research, we must do the publishing ourselves. It is time for us to work together to create the journals we have called for. We are working to establish a non-profit scientific publisher under the banner of the Public Library of Science, operated by scientists, for the benefit of science and the public. With your participation, vision and energy we can establish a new model for scientific publishing. Please join us in this effort.
