European Commission Launches Public Consultation on Digital Scientific Information Access and Preservation

The European Commission has launched a public consultation on digital scientific information access and preservation.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

A public consultation on access to, and preservation of, digital scientific information has been launched by the European Commission on the initiative of European Commission Vice President for the Digital Agenda Neelie Kroes and Commissioner for Research and Innovation, Máire Geoghegan-Quinn. European researchers, engineers and entrepreneurs must have easy and fast access to scientific information, to compete on an equal footing with their counterparts across the world. Modern digital infrastructures can play a key role in facilitating access. However, a number of challenges remain, such as high and rising subscription prices to scientific publications, an ever-growing volume of scientific data, and the need to select, curate and preserve research outputs. Open access, defined as free access to scholarly content over the Internet, can help address this. Scientists, research funding organisations, universities, and other interested parties are invited to send their contributions on how to improve access to scientific information. The consultation will run until 9 September 2011. . . .

Interested parties are invited to express their views on the following key science policy questions:

  • how scientific articles could become more accessible to researchers and society at large
  • how research data can be made widely available and how it could be re-used
  • how permanent access to digital content can be ensured and what barriers are preventing the preservation of scientific output

| Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography 2010 | Electronic Theses and Dissertations Bibliography | Google Books Bibliography | Institutional Repository Bibliography | Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography | Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography 2010 | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview |