by CKR
We all know by now that the New York Times plans to put its opinion pieces and other material behind a subscription-only firewall in September. Large parts of the rest of the world are moving in the opposite direction.
The UK’s Wellcome Trust, a funder of biomedical research, will require in October that papers on its funded projects be deposited in PubMed Central. Le Centre national du recherche scientifique (CNRS) maintains a free archive of its papers and others. The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Royal Library are developing a network of databases called Digital Academic Repositories. The Berlin Declaration on open internet access to scientific results has been signed by 56 organizations in 17 countries.
In the private sector, Celera Genomics is ending subscriptions and will deposit its data on the human genome in the publicly available GenBank (via 6 May issue of Science).
All science. Perhaps newspapers operate on different principles. More and more newspapers and magazines have been moving to web subscription policies. Their information is perishable in a way that scientific results are not. But this judgement is being made by people whose previous business judgements have resulted in lower readership and lower advertising revenue.