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Vice President of the Board of the University of Amsterdam and Hogeschool van Amsterdam (University of Applied Sciences) and a member of the Executive Board of SURF. It’s high time! This month (October 2009) saw the arrival of the latest version of the Key Figures [Kerncijfers] booklet published by the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science. Over the period from 2002 to 2007, the output of the Dutch universities, taken as a whole, has risen from 52,000 to 61,000 scientific and scholarly publications. That is a rise of no less than 20% in only five years. University staff can consult all these publications, and other scientific/scholarly literature, on their own computer, where and whenever it suits them. That is an extremely valuable facility. However, that facility is closed to other interested parties, for example teachers at Regional Education Centres (ROCs), employees of engineering firms, and specialists at general hospitals. All these people need to pay to consult the material or collect a copy from a university library. That is an undesirable situation because a lot of scientific/scholarly insights bear fruit mainly when they are put into actual practice. That is why SURF has declared 2009 to be “Open Access Year”, with “Open Access” meaning access for everyone to all scientific/scholarly information. After all, why should ordinary people have to pay for access to scientific/scholarly knowledge that they have in fact financed as taxpayers? Scientific and scholarly periodicals are compiled by commercial publishers. They pay the cost of peer review and correction, and claim that that gives them the right to only make scientific/scholarly publications available in return for payment. Their contribution counts for little, though, compared to the cost of the research work involved, which has been paid for out of taxes. All this material should therefore be accessible to all. To that end, bodies that finance research, for example universities and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), should make open access a compulsory obligation for all researchers. To compensate the publishers, those organisations’ research budget should include an amount for peer review and correction. It is high time that we made the necessary arrangements. Published previously in SURF magazine. |
