Sunday, April 15, 2012

Open Source


Wellcome Trust joins 'academic spring' to open up science

Wellcome backs campaign to break stranglehold of academic journals and allow all research papers to be shared free online

Wellcome's move adds weight to the campaign for open access to academic knowledge, which could lead to benefits across a broad range of research fields. Photograph: Mauricio Lima/AFP/Getty Images
One of the world's largest funders of science is to throw its weight behind a growing campaign to break the stranglehold of academic journals and allow all research papers to be shared online.
Nearly 9,000 researchers have already signed up to a boycott of journals that restrict free sharing as part of a campaign dubbed the "academic spring" by supporters due to its potential for revolutionising the spread of knowledge.
But the intervention of the Wellcome Trust, the largest non-governmental funder of medical research after the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is likely to galvanise the movement by forcing academics it funds to publish in open online journals./.../

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