OPEN ACCESS - KNOWLEDGE FOR ALL | HOME PAGE

The members of the roundtable first identified a set of principles, which are significant for the existence of a robust system of scholarly publishing. These are the following:

1. Peer review must continue its critical role in maintaining high quality and editorial integrity.
2. Adaptable business models will be necessary to sustain the enterprise in an evolving landscape.
3. Scholarly and scientific publications can and should be more broadly accessible with improved functionality to a wider public and the research community.
4. Sustained archiving and preservation are essential complements to reliable publishing methods.
5. The results of research need to be published and maintained in ways that maximize the possibilities for creative reuse and interoperation among sites that host them.

Seeking to balance the need for and potential of increased access to scholarly articles with the need to preserve the essential functions of the scholarly publishing enterprise, roundtable member reached a series of recommendations. The Roundtable's core recommendation is: Each federal research funding agency should expeditiously but carefully develop and implement an explicit public access policy that brings about free public access to the results of the research that it funds as soon as possible after those results have been published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Moreover, to implement the aforementioned fundamental objective, the Roundtable proposed the following additional recommendations:

1. Agencies should work in full and open consultation with all stakeholders, as well as with OSTP, to develop their public access policies.
2. Agencies should establish specific embargo periods (zero to twelve months) between publication and public access
3. Policies should be guided by the need to foster interoperability.
4. Every effort should be made to have the version of record (i.e. the final, published version) as the version to which free access is provided
5. Government agencies should extend the reach of their public access policies through voluntary collaborations with nongovernmental stakeholders.
6. Policies should foster innovation in the research and educational use of scholarly publications.
7. Government public access policies should address the need to resolve the challenges of long-termdigital preservation.
8. OSTP should establish a public access advisory committee.