| Summary: | EDITORIAL
By any measure it has been a huge year
for the open-access movement. At the
beginning of the year, it looked possible
that the public access policy of the US
National Institutes of Health (NIH) might
be rolled back by the Research Works Act,
a legislative attempt supported by Elsevier
and the Association of American Publishers to make such policies illegal [1]. But as
we move towards year’s end, the momentum behind open access looks unstoppable
with the announcement of major policy
initiatives in the United States, the European Union, Denmark, and the United
Kingdom (see Table 1). Nevertheless,
there is still much to be done and the
challenges remain large, but the remaining
questions are largely ones of implementation, not principle.
Each year, a range of open-access
organizations support Open Access Week
(http://www.openaccessweek.org/), a
global event that provides the research
community, funding agencies, policy makers, and open-access publishers with an
opportunity to discuss, publicize, and
advocate for open access. With this year’s
successes, it is also a good time to reflect
on and to consider how we ensure that the
promise of open access is delivered. But if
we are to exploit the potential that open
access provides, we must look beyond just
making research findings accessible to
ensuring that they are legally and technically available for re-use.
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