The EC Petition and the EC Poll

Les Carr's message below was forwarded to the SPARC Institutional Repositories Discussion List. It's a clear indication that European (and other) researchers are strongly in favor of Open Access as a tool for facilitating their research endeavors.

** Cross-Posted **

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2007 00:42:08 +0000
From: Leslie Carr
Reply-To: American Scientist Open Access Forum

To: AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM@LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG
Subject: The EC Petition and the EC Poll

The European research and academic community has demonstrated overwhelming support for the European Commission's proposed Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate (A1). A petition, launched jointly on January 14th 2007 by research organisations in a number of European countries, has drawn over 20,000 signatures from Europe and worldwide in support of the EC's proposal. The response includes almost 1,000 institutional signatories from National Academies of Sciences, Universities, Rectors' conferences, Learned Societies, national and private research funding councils, and industries that apply research.)

In conjunction with the petition, a separate poll has been conducted of the EC Open Access Mandate's specific target constituency. The administrators of currently active EU FP6 projects were asked to register a vote FOR or AGAINST open access to research results. The result was overwhelming: 85.8% in favour of open access, 14.2% against (based on a healthy 8.22% response rate from 2652 email invitations to vote).

Previous research has demonstrated the increased impact that Open Access to Research Results offers the research industry.
The petition and the poll demonstrate that Open Access now receives broad-based and popular support as a mainstream requirement of the European research industry.
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Les Carr
University of Southampton