Open Access

Open Students is a new blog for students about open access to research. It is run by Gavin Baker (who also recently joined Peter Suber at Open Access News - Congratulations!) and sponsored by SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, as part of its student outreach activities.

The blog will cover the issues of Open Science as it affects the college students and will have frequent guest-bloggers (students, librarians, researchers, publishers...) - of which you can be one if you contact Gavin.

This declaration calls on educators, learners, and policy makers to increase participation in the open sharing of educational materials

On January 11th, the NIH announced their new public access policy, which has now been strengthened to a mandate as required by the appropriations bill signed by President Bush in December.

On Dec 26th, 2007, President Bush signed the Bill that requires all NIH-funded research to be made available to the public.

Last Tuesday, I gave a talk at Stanford University to students and faculty about neglected tropical diseases, and I discussed the enormous difficulty that researchers in endemic countries face in accessing health research literature. In the discussion session after the talk, an audience member (who was a former drug company rep) offered a fascinating suggestion.