*Cross-Posted*
Moderator's note:
Approximately 13 European University rectors and a handful
of
research laboratory and institute directors met last week in
Liege, hosted by Bernard Rentier, Rector of the University,
to
discuss an initiative for "EurOpenScholarship".
Stevan Harnad
forwarded several messages on the meeting and its results
(thanking Alma Swan for forwarding Rentier's press release
[below]), which we have combined here for convenience in
reading.
Harnad:
"I could not attend the European Rectors' meeting on
Open Access,
but I did send a 23-minute PPT video, part of which, so I
understand, was shown at the meeting. The whole video is
online.
Please feel free to use it to promote Open Access Mandates
and
Metrics at your own institution. (The very brief intro is in
French; the rest is in English.)
http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Temp/liege22.mov&q
uot;
Bernard Rentier's comments on EurOpenScholarship
(Excerpt translated from: http://recteur.
blogs.ulg.ac.be/?p=151 )
"EurOpenScholar will be a showcase and a tool for the
promotion
of OA in Europe. It will be a consortium of European
universities
resolved to move forward on OA and to try to convince the
largest
possible number of researchers, their institutions and their
European Funding Agencies to engage now in what will
undoubtedly
be the mode of communication of tomorrow. The transitional
period
will be the most difficult. Our goal is to facilitate and
thereby
accelerate as much as possible the transition to the OA
era.
"The EurOpenScholar web site, hosted by the ULg, will
provide an
information-gathering service concerning OA institutional
repositories and OA journals, with a discussion forum on OA
and
the methods emerging in the field of scientometrics
(research
performance and impact measurement, ranking and anlysis).
"EurOpenScholar's primary objective will be to open
researchers'
eyes to the new ways of promoting the spread of knowledge
and of
assessing research progress and performance in the OA era.
This
will contribute to the advancement of research in Europe and
to
the promotion of European research and European
researchers.
"In addition, EurOpenScholar will address itself to
research
managers, funding agencies, national and local research
policy-makers, the R&D industry, the media, and the
general
public, facilitating synergies and technology transfer and
providing an effective channel for the communication of
real
science to the public, either directly or through the
media."
***************
The full press release from the University of Liege:
Press Release from the university of Liege
http://www.ulg.ac.be/relationsexterieures/RecteursOA/
On Thursday, October 18, the Rector of the University of
Liege
hosted the Rectors of the Universities of Trieste and Rome
2,
Roma 3, Polytechnic of Catalonia in Barcelona, Vicenza,
Porto,
from Salford, Lancaster, Rotterdam (U. Erasmus), Turin,
Antwerp,
Ghent and Southampton, as well as the chairmen or directors
of
the Paul Ehrlich Institute, the Instituto Superiore di
Sanita,
Caspur Consortium, the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and a
representative of the European Commission .
The purpose of the meeting was to establish the foundations
of a
European movement for Open Access to scientific and
scholarly
publications: EurOpenScholarship.
The Rector of U, Liege has been involved in the movement to
free
research publications from the financial straitjacket
imposed on
universities and research centers by the large publishers.
Since
1993, while the price index rose by about 30%, journal
prices
have risen to more than 275%, making it impossible for a
normally
funded institution to access all the literature essential
for
conducting good research.
Despite the Berlin Declaration in 2003 and the European
Petition
of 2007, few universities have actually implemented a
vigorous
open access policy. That is why the Chancellor of U. Liege
wanted
to gather in Liege the senior leadership of the European
universities that are the most advanced in this respect and
to
launch an initiative that provides a practical follow-up to
the
declaration already signed by so many research
institutions.
The meeting resulted in the creation of the
EurOpenScholarship
whose goal will be to continue efforts by informing the
European
university communities about the opportunities available to
researchers today for providing open access, as well as to
establish, in the universities and research centers in
Europe, a
central institutional repository (in Liege,
"DIGITHEQUE"),
allowing publications to be deposited and, wherever
possible,
made openly accessible to all.
The University of Liege, which signed a massive OA petition
in
2007 (the highest number of signatures from a single
university)
is positioning itself as a pioneer and clearly much of this
is
now considered the way of the future for scientific
publication.
The ambition is to spread this message across Europe.
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