Oalib, a new feature of open access

For years, countries have been edging towards open access for research, with some funding agencies requiring that researchers make their papers publicly available within a set period after publication.  A report commissioned by the UK government recommends a more radical step: making all papers open access from the start, with authors paying publishers up-front to make their work free to read last year. Open Access gains much support from governments. Just a few days before, 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.

Since 1960s, when open access was proposed for the first time, open access has been urged by some strengths such as libraries, scientists, new publishers. Now impetus is largely from administrations. After the day When the UK government announced on 16 July that it would require much of the country’s taxpayer-funded research to be open-access from April 2013, the European Commission (EC) launched a similar proposal to open up all the work funded by its Horizon 2020 research program, set to run in the European Union (EU) from 2014 to 2020 and disburse €80 billion (US$98.3 billion). 

In this atmosphere, Oalib ( see www.oalib.net) actively helps to search and use scholar literature, in broad disciplines: science, technologies, economics, engineering, and emerging disciplines.