A new step of Open Access: Oalib

Five years ago, the US National Institutes of Health was first putting into practice its mandate that (at least) the authors’ final versions of papers must be freely available within a maximum of a year of publishing — a ‘green’ open-access approach, with which this publication has consistently complied.


A US announcement on open access came last week. The US government said that publications from taxpayer-funded research should be made free to read after a year’s delay — expanding a policy that has, until now, applied only to biomedical science. The US Office of Science and Technology Policy has asked recently federal agencies to prepare plans to ensure that all articles and data produced from research that they fund are made publicly accessible within 12 months of publication.


We know from the policy that the US administration does not have enough resolve towards the policy that ultimately benefits science the most: ‘gold’ open access, in which the published article is immediately freely available, paid for by a processing charge rather than by readers’ subscriptions as it had asked for delayed-access.


In total, governments have taken part in completion of Open Access, which is progressive for many years. On one hand, completion of sustainable open access is necessarily based on sustainable service platform of publication. Both green-rode and gold –rode are products of promoting open access, and they are adaptive to different environments. On the other hand, the deepening of open access also contributing to exchange of knowledge should be taken into consideration. Oalib is taking the first step to provide a simple way to access research papers. Oalib has opened service to search for academic papers online and is pursuing to make the access of open access papers more convenient and easily operating.(see www.oalib.net)