Concepts of Openess and Open Access

Many Nobel laureates and luminaries are supporting Open Access to facilitate wide dissemination of research results. Some of them who lent prominent contributions and comments regarding open access, are as follows:-

Sir John Edward Sulston, FRS, is a British biologist and the 2002 Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine laureate. He is currently Chair of the newly-founded Institute for Science, Ethics and Innovation (iSEI) at the University of Manchester. He is one of the supporters of OA movement. Along with him, philosopher John Harris he is one of the main architects of the Manchester Manifesto that came into being in November, 2009.

Peter Suber is a leading voice in the open access movement. He is a senior research professor of philosophy at Earlham College, Fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center and Office for Scholarly Communication. He is the open access project director at Public Knowledge and a senior researcher at SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition). He is also a member of the Advisory Boards at the Wikimedia Foundation, the Open Knowledge Foundation, and other organizations devoted to open access.

Alma Swan is a consultant working in the field of scholarly communication. She is a director of Key Perspectives Ltd, Director of Advocacy Programmes for SPARC Europe and Convenor for Enabling Open Scholarship, the organization of universities promoting the principles of open scholarship in the academic community. Her work covers market research and business modelling, project management and evaluation, research communication practices and behaviours, and the study and promotion of new forms of scholarly communication in the age of the Web.

Steve Harnad is a cognitive scientist. Harnad was the founder of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, of which he remained editor-in-chief until 2002. In addition, he founded Psycoloquy (an early electronic journal sponsored by the American Psychological Association), CogPrints(an electronic eprint archive in the cognitive sciences hosted by the University of Southampton), and the American Scientist Open Access Forum (since 1998; now the Global Open Access List, GOAL). Harnad is an active promoter of open access(EPrints, EnablingOpenScholarship (EOS), Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook (OASIS), SPARC Campus Open Access Policies).

Jean Claude Guedon is the founder of the first Canadian scholarly electronic journal Surfaces (started in 1991) and a Steering Group member of Open Humanities Press, an international Open Access publishing collective specializing in critical and cultural theory.

Bill Hubbard is a Project Manager of Sherpa/Romeo. The Sherpa/Romeo site offers information about publishers' policies with respect to self-archiving pre-print and post-print research papers.

Rick Johnson is the founder of SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition). He is part of the international alliance of academic and research libraries to promote open access to scholarship. It acts as a catalyst for action and focuses on supporting the emergence of new scholarly communication models that expand the dissemination of scholarly research and reduce financial pressures on libraries and create a more open system of scholarly communications. SPARC’s strategy focuses on reducing barriers tothe access, sharing, and use of scholarship.

Sir Brian Follett is the director of The Research Support Libraries Group (RSLG) which is launched by the four UK higher education funding bodies, in collaboration with the British Library and the national libraries of Wales and Scotland started. He played an instrumental role in reforming and establishing governance policy of JISC.

MIT Faculty Chair Bish Sanyal, a supporter of OA movement, described the anonymous vote for MIT-open-access-mandate as “a signal to the world that we speak in a unified voice; that what we value is the free flow of ideas.”[http://www.sciencedomain.org/]. In September 2008, Faculty Chair Bish Sanyal appointed an MIT Faculty Ad-hoc Committee on Open Access Publishing to coordinate a faculty-wide discussion of how our scholarly publications are and should be disseminated, with particular attention to the possibility of providing "open access" to those publications. Hal Abelson isa professor at Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a vocal supporter of OA movement. Under his chairmanship, the committee formulated the MIT Faculty Open-Access Policy which became university-wide OA mandate.

Daniel Shek, is a professor at Chinese University of Hong Kong,Hong Kong. He opines that: “Open Access journals offer an innovative and efficient way of publication for academics and professionals in a wide range of disciplines. The papers published are of high quality after rigorous peer review and they are indexed in major international databases. I read Open Access journals to keep abreast of the recent development in my field of study." [http:/www.sciencedomain.org]

M. Bendandi, professor, University Clinic of Navarre, Spain, opines that, "Open access journals have become a fundamental tool for students, researchers, patients and the general public. Many people from institutions which do not have library or cannot afford to subscribe scientific journals benefit of them on a daily basis. The articles are among the best and cover most scientific areas." [http://www.sciencedomain.org/]

J.C. Jones is professor at Mechanics of Materials Research Group, University of Aberdeen, Scotland. He is the author of 300 publications including six university-level textbooks. In support of the OA movement he said, "The advantage of the Open Journal series is that it is just that: open, and accessible to anyone with a PC at no charge I appeal to scholars across the disciplines to consider the Open Journal series as a forum for their work." [http://www.sciencedomain.org/]