Industry trends

The petition calling on the European Commission to adopt polices to guarantee free public access to research results has been delivered to the EU Commissioner for Science and Research.

The petition urging the European Commission to support open access has attracted over 15,000 signatories in its first two weeks.

The US Department of Energy and the British Library have teamed up to make international science information resources accessible via a single internet portal.

Thomson Scientific is supplying journal literature information to The Patent Board for a study of scientific research trends on behalf of the US National Science Foundation.

A group of European organisations are calling on the European Commission to support public access to the output of EC-funded research shortly after publication.

The UK version of the US National Institutes of Health’s open-access biomedical research archive has now been launched.

As Google and its rivals move into traditional research information territory, they could face challenges of their own. A new type of search engine is the latest project from Wikia.

Nature’s authors and readers are reluctant to participate in an open peer-review process, according to a recent experiment carried out by the journal.

Growth in online usage of Oxford Journal’s Nucleic Acids Research, a journal that went fully open-access in January 2005, is more linked to search engines than to the change in publishing model.