[Taxacom] Proposed Amendment to the Code

[Kipling (Kip) Will]

If governmental funding agencies mandated that all publications 
resulting from research significantly supported by public funds (e.g. 
NSF, NIH, USDA) must be Open Access with relatively loose copyright 
control, we would see a pretty rapid shift and appropriate technology 
would emerge to handle these issues. Just follow the money.

After all it is the people's money and so the results and information 
should be publicly and freely available. Our taxes already paid for it 
once. Maybe some publishers would lobby against this.

cheers,
Kip

(p.s. No, I haven't always published OA, but I am changin' my ways)

L Penev wrote:

> 1.      Open access (OA) ? *mandatory* for taxa descriptions on the day of
> publication (Gold OA) and *highly recommended *for the whole papers where a
> new taxon is described. How to separate new taxa descriptions from the rest
> of the respective papers then to avoid copyright problems? Providing XML
> files of new taxa descriptions to recognized repositories such as EOL and
> taxon-based aggregators or linking XML files to the Official Register would
> be an relatively easy way to solve the problem and to ensure an immediate
> availability and long-term persistence of descriptions. Needless to say, the
> best possible policy here is to recommend Gold OA for the taxonomic works in
> general.


-- 
Kipling W. Will
Associate Professor/Insect Systematist
Associate Director,Essig Museum of Entomology

mail to:
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