PHA-Exchange> Open Access publishing: Grants for researchers - Academic publishing made more accessible for scientists in developing world

[George Lessard]

French
http://www.soros.org/openaccess/fr/grants-journals.shtml
http://www.soros.org/openaccess/fr/index.shtml
Russian
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Begin forwarded message:

From: vbarbour at plos.org
Date: Tue Mar 23, 2004  7:39:13  AM Canada/Mountain
To: hif-net at who.int
Subject: [HIF-net at WHO] Open Access publishing: Grants for researchers

For immediate release

Contact:
Melissa Hageman, Open Society Institute: (212)
548-0142/MHagemann at sorosny.org
Helen Doyle, Public Library of Science: (415) 624-1217/hdoyle at plos.org

Academic publishing made more accessible for scientists in developing 
world

New Open Society Institute Grants Program Will Promote Open Access
Publishing

March 22, 2004  New York, NY & San Francisco, CA  The Open Society 
Institute (OSI) and Public Library of Science (PLoS) today announced a 
new grants program to support open access publishing in developing and 
transition countries. The grants will make it much easier for 
scientists based in
developing and transition countries to submit articles to the premiere 
peer-reviewed research journals published by PLoS.

"Scientists in poorer countries have been virtually excluded from the 
journal publishing world," said Darius Cuplinskas, director of OSI's 
Information Program. "Open access journals will remove barriers and 
make these scientists full members of the international scientific 
community.

PLoS is a non-profit advocacy organization and a publisher of 
open-access journals, which are available free of charge online and are 
subsidized largely by author-side charges for publication. While this 
pay-to-publish system allows PLoS to make scientific and medical 
literature immediately
accessible to anyone in the world with an Internet connection, many 
authors from developing countries cannot afford the fees. Now, 
scientists affiliated with the OSI-funded member institutions will be 
entitled to a waiver of publication charges for their articles in PLoS 
journals.

OSIs Information Program has been a strong supporter of the open access 
movement. Its Budapest Open Access Initiative, launched in 2002, 
advocates for the support of two parallel strategies for the adoption 
of open access: self-archiving and open access journals.

The OSI/PLoS Institutional Membership grants will target developing and 
transition countries.  Authors from the least developed countries will 
receive a waiver of publication charge upon request, a policy PLoS has 
had in place since the launch of its first journal, PLoS Biology, in 
October
2003.  To ensure that ability to pay publication charges does not 
influence the review process, PLoS has a firewall in place to shield 
requests from all editors and reviewers.

The debate about open access has shifted recently, said Dr. Helen 
Doyle, PLoS director of development and strategic alliances. Doubts 
about its value have been replaced with doubts about its viability. 
This commitment from OSI answers the question of how scientists in 
developing countries will be able to publish in our journals on a large 
scale.

The complete list of countries and regions where institutions are 
eligible for the new memberships is as follows:

Albania
Armenia
Azerbaijan
Belarus
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Botswana
Bulgaria
Cameroon
Cote d'Ivoire
Croatia
Czech Republic
Estonia
Georgia
Ghana
Guatemala
Hungary
Indonesia
Kazakhstan
Kosovo
Kyrgyzstan
Laos
Latvia
Lithuania
Macedonia
Moldova
Mongolia
Namibia
Nigeria
Peru
Poland
Romania
Russia
Serbia and Montenegro
Slovakia
South Africa
Swaziland
Tajikistan
Thailand
Turkey
Ukraine
Uzbekistan
Vietnam
Zimbabwe

More information about the grants is available at
http://www.soros.org/openaccess/grants.shtml
The joint OSI-PLoS announcement follows the January launch of the PLoS 
Institutional Membership
program. More information about the PLoS Membership Program is 
available at http://www.plos.org/support.

[HIF-net at WHO profile: Virginia Barbour works for the Public Library 
of Science in the UK. The Public Library of Science (PLoS) is a 
non-profit organization of scientists and physicians committed to 
making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available 
public resource.
<http://www.plos.org> <vbarbour at plos.org>]

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