Watch the road

Stevan Harnad, Pit-Bulls vs. Petitions: A Historic Time for Open Access, Open Access Archivangelism, January 30, 2007.  Excerpt:

Tempting as it is to keep chattering about pit-bulls and commercial venality we should perhaps refocus on something far, far more important and substantive that is going on at the moment. This is where today's real historic Open Access (OA) developments are transpiring:

The petition in support of the European Commission's Proposal to mandate OA self-archiving has already amassed 13,000 signatures in 13 days and is still growing. It is being signed not only by individual grassroots researchers but by universities, learned societies, scientific academies:...

The petition is also being signed by institutional libraries, research organisations and publishers:...

Please consult the petition's current updates as these figures are changing by the minute. (And if you or your organisation support the OA mandate proposals, please sign too.)

In addition to this petition in support of proposed mandates (of which the EC's is one, but of course the United States has a huge proposed mandate pending too: the FRPAA), the number of actually adopted mandates is growing steadily too (and will no doubt be accelerated by the growth of the EC petition):

ROARMAP now lists 58 registered OA policies, 27 mandates (21 adopted, 6 proposed)....