Guardian Unlimited Researchers at Southampton have been looking at open access to published research.
“, Prof Harnad’s plan, which has already been put in place at his own university, calls for all academics who have had research papers accepted by journals to place information about the paper – such as its title and author, known as metadata – on a university’s own archive for all to see. Alongside that should be a copy of the article itself.
The problem arises because publishers don’t generally allow material to be published any where other than via their Journal. They do though generally allow users to self archive.
As far as I can tell, this idea would seem to be then allowing others to share your self archive.
Clearly there are problems then in that Journals will sell fewer copies – and could it start becoming the Napster of academia. As more material is shared without Journals, so Journals lose money, they are no longer published … so peer review of research stops happening …