EurOpenScholarship: Press Release and Comments

[Stevan Harnad <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk>]

    *Cross-Posted*

Moderator's note:

Approximately 13 European University rectors and a handful of 
research laboratory and institute directors met last week in 
Liege, hosted by Bernard Rentier, Rector of the University, to 
discuss an initiative for "EurOpenScholarship".  Stevan Harnad 
forwarded several messages on the meeting and its results 
(thanking Alma Swan for forwarding Rentier's press release 
[below]), which we have combined here for convenience in reading.

Harnad:

"I could not attend the European Rectors' meeting on Open Access, 
but I did send a 23-minute PPT video, part of which, so I 
understand, was shown at the meeting.  The whole video is online. 
Please feel free to use it to promote Open Access Mandates and 
Metrics at your own institution. (The very brief intro is in 
French; the rest is in English.)

      http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Temp/liege22.mov";

Bernard Rentier's comments on EurOpenScholarship
(Excerpt translated from: http://recteur.blogs.ulg.ac.be/?p=151 )

"EurOpenScholar will be a showcase and a tool for the promotion 
of OA in Europe. It will be a consortium of European universities 
resolved to move forward on OA and to try to convince the largest 
possible number of researchers, their institutions and their 
European Funding Agencies to engage now in what will undoubtedly 
be the mode of communication of tomorrow. The transitional period 
will be the most difficult. Our goal is to facilitate and thereby 
accelerate as much as possible the transition to the OA era.

"The EurOpenScholar web site, hosted by the ULg,  will provide an 
information-gathering service concerning OA institutional 
repositories and OA journals, with a discussion forum on OA and 
the methods emerging in the field of scientometrics (research 
performance and impact measurement, ranking and anlysis).

"EurOpenScholar's primary objective will be to open researchers' 
eyes to the new ways of promoting the spread of knowledge and of 
assessing research progress and performance in the OA era. This 
will contribute to the advancement of research in Europe and to 
the promotion of European research and European researchers.

"In addition, EurOpenScholar will address itself to research 
managers, funding agencies, national and local research 
policy-makers, the R&D industry, the media, and the general 
public, facilitating synergies and technology transfer and 
providing an effective channel for the communication of  real 
science to the public, either directly or through the media."

***************

The full press release from the University of Liege:

Press Release from the university of Liege
http://www.ulg.ac.be/relationsexterieures/RecteursOA/

On Thursday, October 18, the Rector of the University of Liege 
hosted the Rectors of the Universities of Trieste and Rome 2, 
Roma 3, Polytechnic of Catalonia in Barcelona, Vicenza, Porto, 
from Salford, Lancaster, Rotterdam (U. Erasmus), Turin, Antwerp, 
Ghent and Southampton, as well as the chairmen or directors of 
the Paul Ehrlich Institute, the Instituto Superiore di Sanita, 
Caspur Consortium, the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and a 
representative of the European Commission .

The purpose of the meeting was to establish the foundations of a 
European movement for Open Access to scientific and scholarly 
publications: EurOpenScholarship.

The Rector of U, Liege has been involved in the movement to free 
research publications from the financial straitjacket imposed on 
universities and research centers by the large publishers. Since 
1993, while the price index rose by about 30%, journal prices 
have risen to more than 275%, making it impossible for a normally 
funded institution to access all the literature essential for 
conducting good research.

Despite the Berlin Declaration in 2003 and the European Petition 
of 2007, few universities have actually implemented a vigorous 
open access policy. That is why the Chancellor of U. Liege wanted 
to gather in Liege the senior leadership of the European 
universities that are the most advanced in this respect and to 
launch an initiative that provides a practical follow-up to the 
declaration already signed by so many research institutions.

The meeting resulted in the creation of the EurOpenScholarship 
whose goal will be to continue efforts by informing the European 
university communities about the opportunities available to 
researchers today for providing open access, as well as to 
establish, in the universities and research centers in Europe, a 
central institutional repository (in Liege, "DIGITHEQUE"), 
allowing publications to be deposited and, wherever possible, 
made openly accessible to all.

The University of Liege, which signed a massive OA petition in 
2007 (the highest number of signatures from a single university) 
is positioning itself as a pioneer and clearly much of this is 
now considered the way of the future for scientific publication. 
The ambition is to spread this message across Europe.