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ELECTRONIC PUBLISHING TRUST FOR DEVELOPMENT
last up-dated June 14th 2008

Please sign here to support the EU Recommendation for guarenteed access to EU-funded research results!
Sponsored by 4 major EU research organisations
****27277 signatures from around the world on June 14th 2008!****
See also the 1336 research organisations suppporting the recommendation

Recent OA news items:

NOTE! The Berlin 6 OA conference (Dusseldorf, Germany, November 11-13, 2008) has just posted its preliminary program. There is a
plenary session on Open Access for Development, to be organised by EPT Trustee, Subbiah Arunachalam.

1) There is so much activity both in the establishment of both new OA journals (or conversion of toll-access journals to OA) and new Institutional Repositories, and in the growing usage of both, that the best way to keep track of these developments is to monitor Peter Suber's Open Access News routinely - it is updated daily.

2) Following on from the NIH and European Research Council's recently agreed OA mandates, further announcements of institutional/funder OA mandates have come from Harvard University Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the University of Southampton and the University of Sterling. Further, the European University Association (representing nearly 800 European Universities) has unanimously recommended the establishment of university interoperable OA repositories. Now the Irish Research Council for Science, Engineering and Technology has announced its OA mandate policy statement and news of many other mandates are in the pipeline . . . For policy details, see the ROARmap site. For implications for developing countries see the EPT Blog.

3) The Open Society Institute has agreed a grant to develop an online OA Sourcebook. This much needed tool, to be called OASIS, will be launched at the ELPUB2008 Conference in Toronto in June 2008. For details of the project, which will provide 'all you need to know about OA' at a single website, see EPT Blog for February 29th 2008.

The Electronic Publishing Trust for Development (EPT) was established in 1996 to facilitate open access to the world's scholarly literature and to support the electronic publication of reviewed bioscience journals from countries experiencing difficulties with traditional publication.

Scientists and publishers in many countries face problems both in accessing the world's research information and in gaining high visibility for their publications and national research output. The cost of printing and distributing journals leads to low circulation levels which in turn leads to a reluctance by scientists to publish. The outcome is the loss of much important scientific information which either remains unavailable to the international scientific community or suffers long delays in publication. The transfer of e-publishing technology and online distribution of such journals can greatly increase visibility and enrich the global knowledge base.

E-publishing workshop in Bangalore, India, November 2006

The main activities of the EPT are to:

provide awareness of the benefits of electronic publishing
transfer e-publishing technology through training and online resources
provide management and distribution support
support open access initiatives and make them known to developing country scientists and publishers

The Trust focusses on the biological sciences which, in such fields as infectious diseases, public health, tropical medicine, biodiversity, environmental and agricultural sciences, require a global picture. Local scientific information is critical, particularly in the case of human, animal and plant disease surveillance and conservation.

Registered Charity Number 1059867