Timeline 2006

This list is part of the Open Access Directory.

• This is a section within the larger Timeline of the open access movement.

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• January 2006. The European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM) published its Statement on Open Access.

• January 7, 2006. The session on open access at the 93rd Indian Science Congress (Hyderabad, January 3-7, 2006) produced an Optimal National Open Access Policy for India. Among other things, it calls for mandating open access to the results of publicly-funded research.

• January 16, 2006. The Governing Board of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) adopted a Recommendation On Open Access To Biodiversity Data, reaffirming and extending its open access statement from last year (listed above under January 2005).

• January 20, 2006. In its Cyberinfrastructure Vision For 21st Century Discovery, version 5.0, the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) endorsed open access to data.

• January 27, 2006. The University of Nottingham (UK) and Lund University (Sweden) officially launched OpenDOAR (Directory of Open Access Repositories).

• January 27, 2006. MIT developed its Copyright Amendment Form to help authors retain the rights they need to authorize open access.

• January 30, 2006. Germany's Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation, DFG) adopted a policy that grantees "should" provide open access to DFG-funded research. (See SOAN for 4/2/06.)

• February 1, 2006. Scholarpedia launched, blending the openness of Wikipedia with expert authors, attribution, and anonymous, expert peer review.

• February 17, 2006. Public GeoData launched an online petition calling for open access to publicly-funded geodata in Europe.

• February 27, 2006. Informatics India launched Open J-Gate, a searchable portal of open-access journals.

• February 21, 2006. Queensland University of Technology created an Open Access to Knowledge (OAK) Law project. The official launch took place November 29-30, 2006.

• March 2006. The Academy of Science of South Africa wrote a report recommending both green and gold open access. See especially Recommendation 6, which would use public funds to pay processing fees at open-access journals, launch a network of open-access repositories, and harvest the repositories

• March 9, 2006. Charles Arthur and Michael Cross launched the Free Our Data campaign for open access to publicly-funded geodata in the UK with an article in The Guardian.

• March 31, 2006. The Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (Curtiba, Brazil, March 20-31, 2006) adopted a statement endorsing open access for biodiversity data.

• April 3, 2006. The European Commission released a report calling for an open-access mandate to publicly-funded research. The report is dated January 2006 but was apparently not released until April 3. The inquiry underlying the report was launched in June 2004. (See SOAN for 5/2/06.)

• April 3, 2006. The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) announced that it is developing a policy of open access to CIHR-funded research. (See SOAN for 5/2/06.)

• April 10, 2006. Eprints added an email request button. DSpace added the feature the next day.

• April 11, 2006. Microsoft launched Live Academic Search.

• April 17, 2006. The pro-business Committee for Economic Development (CED) issued a report supporting the NIH policy, calling for it to be strengthened and extended to other federal funding agencies, and recommending open access for federally-funded research.

• April 17, 2006. Participants in a CODATA workshop (Pretoria, September 5-7, 2005) released a report urging Southern African institutions to mandate open-access archiving and promote data sharing.

• April 25, 2006. Ourmedia released the Open media statement of principles

• May 2006. The German Parliament began considering a bill (based on an article by Gerd Hansen) that would permit author self-archiving of journal articles six months after publication regardless of the terms in a copyright transfer agreement the author might have signed. (See SOAN for 6/2/06.)

• May 2, 2006. Senators John Cornyn and Joe Lieberman introduced the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006 in the U.S. Senate. The FRPAA would mandate open access to most federally funded research. (See SOAN for 5/2/06.)

• May 9, 2006. Humboldt University Berlin adopted an Open Access Declaration.

• May 11, 2006. Sweden launched a national open access initiative whose goal is "to promote maximum accessibility and visibility of works produced by researchers, teachers and students at Swedish universities and university colleges."

• May 15, 2006. India's National Institute of Technology (NIT) in Rourkela adopted an Institute of Technology, Rourkela open-access mandate.

• May 23, 2006. The Finnish Council of University Rectors decided to support a wide-ranging set of initiatives to advance open access in Finland.

• May 23, 2006. The American Anthropological Association (AAA) signed the May 23 letter from the Association of American Publishers (AAP) opposing FRPAA, concerned that FRPAA would harm its publishing arm, AnthroSource. For its own part, the AnthroSource Steering Committee wrote a letter supporting FRPAA (August 9, 2006, made public October 7, 2006). In response, on October 30, 2006, the AAA disbanded the committee.

• May 24, 2006. Elsevier launched its Sponsored-Article hybrid journal model. (See SOAN for 6/2/06.)

• May 31, 2006. The Wall Street Journal published a Harris Poll showing that an overwhelming majority of Americans supported open access for publicly-funded research.

• June 6, 2006. Science Commons launched Scholar's Copyright, three "author addenda" for copyright transfer agreements to help authors retain the rights they need to provide open access to their work.

• June 21, 2006. The Royal Society launched its EXiS Open Choice hybrid journal model. (See SOAN for 7/2/06.)

• June 21, 2006. France's Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) adopted a policy asking its researchers to deposit their research articles in HAL, the central French open-access repository.

• June 22, 2006. CERN published a report outlining its project to convert all the toll-access journals in particle physics to open access. CERN began implementing the plan at a November 3, 2006, meeting. (See SOAN for 9/2/06 and SOAN for 12/2/06.)

• June 25, 2006. Participants in the iCommons iSummit for 2006 (Rio de Janeiro, June 23-25, 2006) released the Rio Declaration on Open Access.

• June 27, 2006. The University of North Carolina released its Journal Author Agreement to help authors retain the rights they needed to authorize open access.

• June 28, 2006. The Research Councils UK (RCUK) issued its long-awaited open-access policy. It lets the eight separate Research Councils go their own way, but on the day of the announcement, three had already decided to mandate open access to the research they fund. (See SOAN for 7/2/06.)
• June 29, 2006. SHERPA launched JULIET, a database of the open-access policies adopted by funding agencies.

• July 28, 2006. Twenty-five US university provosts signed a public letter endorsing FRPAA and calling for open access to publicly-funded research. This letter, organized by the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, triggered a wave of similar letters: a July 31, 2006, letter organized by Greater Western Library Alliance, a September 5, 2006 letter organized by the Oberlin Group, and a September 6, 2006, letter organized by the New England Council of Presidents. SPARC then consolidated the signatures and provided a web form for US-based provosts and presidents to add new ones.

• August 3, 2006. BMJ launched the BMJ Unlocked hybrid journal program.

• August 4, 2006. The Science Navigation Group (parent company to BioMed Central) launched Chemistry Central, its first project beyond biomedicine. At the same time it announced plans for PhysMath Central. A new umbrella organization, Open Access Central, will coordinate the growing family of disciplinary projects.

• August 8, 2006. John Wiley & Sons launched its Funded Access hybrid journal program.

• August 9, 2006. The University of Tasmania School of Computing adopted an of Tasmania School of Computing open access mandate for both faculty and graduate students.

• August 12, 2006. Cambridge University Press launched the Cambridge Open Option hybrid journal program.

• August 14, 2006. The American Chemical Society launched its AuthorChoice hybrid journal program.

• August 16, 2006. The American Physical Society launched its Free To Read hybrid journal program.

• August 20, 2006. The US National Endowment for the Humanities adopted guidelines giving preference to projects that promise free online access to the results. (See SOAN for 10/2/06.)

• August 28, 2006. Stockholm University adopted the of Southampton policy that faculty shall, as far as possible, deposit their research articles in the institutional repository.

• August 30, 2006. OhioLink released its Author Addendum (approved May 2006) to help authors retain the rights they need to authorize open access.

• September 2006. Four German universities launched the Informationsplattform Open Access.

• September 1, 2006. The Institute of Physics, publisher of 73 physics journals, launched EprintWeb.org, a new mirror, front end, and enhancement to arXiv.

• September 7, 2006. Participants in the Second Gulf-Maghreb Scientific Congress (Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, February 25-26, 2006) issued the Declaration of Riyadh for Free Access to Scientific and Technical Information in Arabic and French. An English translation came out on October 12, 2006.

• September 11, 2006. The European Commission and nine European research institutions launched DRIVER (Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research), a large-scale, international knowledge infrastructure built on open-access repositories.

• September 23, 2006. Digital Universe launched the open-access Encyclopedia of Earth.

• September 25, 2006. The American Society of Plant Biologists adopted a hybrid journal program.

• September 28, 2006. Taylor & Francis launched its iOpenAccess hybrid journal program.

• October 2006. The Australian government published a report on Research Quality Framework recommending open access to publicly-funded research.

• October 2006. The newly updated UK Model NESLi2 Licence for Journals contains a provision (3.1.3.13) to allow open-access archiving.

• October 1, 2006. Open access mandates took effect at four of the eight Research Councils UK (RCUK): the Biotechnology & Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSCR), Economic & Social Research Council (ESRC), Medical Research Council (MRC), and Natural Environment Research Council (NERC). The first three were adopted in June 2006 and the fourth in August. Also on October 1, an open-access request or encouragement (short of a mandate) took effect at a fifth Research Council, the Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils (CCLRC).

• October 1, 2006. The year-old OA policy at the Wellcome Trust was extended to all outstanding grants, no longer how long ago they were awarded.

• October 2, 2006. The Commission to the European Parliament published report recommending open access to publicly-funded EU geodata.

• October 3, 2006. The Royal Society of Chemistry launched its Open Science hybrid journal program.

• October 6, 2006. Austria's Furderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung (FWF, Fund for the Promotion of Scientific Research) adopted an open access policy asking its grantees to provide open access to FWF-funded research.

• October 10, 2006. The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) released a draft policy that would mandate open access to CIHR-funded research.

• October 11, 2006. A group of important French research institutions (CEMAGREF, CIRAD, CNRS, INRA, INRIA, INSERM, IRD, and the Pasteur Institute) agreed to use HAL (Hyper Article on Line) for their open-access archiving. Some already required open-access archiving for their research output (INRA) and some strongly recommended it (CNRS, INRIA, INSERM).

• October 12, 2006. Chemists Without Borders adopted an Open Chemistry Position Statement.

• October 17, 2007. Larry Sanger (co-founder of Wikipedia) launched Citizendium, a "progressive fork" of Wikipedia using author attribution and expert peer review.

• October 23, 2006. China announced a mandate for open data.

• October 25, 2006. JISC and SURF drafted a model license to help authors retain the rights they need for open-access archiving.

• October 27, 2006. Participants in a Mexico City conference issued The Declaration of Mexico, recommending open access policies to Latin American universities and governments.

• October 30, 2006. Yale University and the UN Environment Programme officially launched Online Access to Research in the Environment (OARE).

• November 2006. The Karman Center for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Bern committed itself to open access for all its future projects.

• November 2006. The Association for Progressive Communications (APC) revised its Internet Rights Charter, which now (in section 3.3) construes open access to publicly-funded research as a consequence of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The first edition of the charter was developed in 2001-2002.

• November 2006. Canada's Athabasca University adopted a policy asking its faculty to self-archive their peer-reviewed research articles

• November 2006. Twenty-two US federal government agencies formed an Interagency Working Group on Digital Data (IWGDD) and plan to deposit the data generated by their research grantees in a network of OA repositories. They are considering an OA mandate.

• November 1, 2006. The eight titles in the European Physical Journal family adopted a hybrid journal model.

• November 2, 2006. The Australian Government Productivity Commission released a report recommending open access to publicly-funded research.

• November 20, 2006. Horizons Unlimited (Bologna, Italy) launched OpenArchives.eu, a major new directory of open-access repositories.

• November 21, 2006. The European Parliament reached a compromise on the INSPIRE Directive (Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe). Geospatial data "designed for the general public" will "generally" be open access although government agencies may charge cost-recovery fees "for access to data that has to be updated frequently, such as weather reports". The directive takes effect in the summer of 2007.

• November 22, 2006. Participants in a Bangalore conference (November 2-3, 2006) drafted a model National Open Access Policy for Developing Countries.

• November 28, 2006. The Council of the Rectors of Portuguese Universities released a declaration on open access it had approved about two weeks earlier.

• December 2006. The Scientific Council of the European Research Council (ERC) issued a Statement on Open Access in which it pledged to adopt an OA mandate for ERC-funded research "as soon as pertinent repositories become operational".

• December 2006. Word surfaced of Google's program to digitize the back runs of journals for free online access. (This program probably began earlier but was not publicly revealed until August 2007.)

• December 1, 2006. The open-access mandate at the UK's Particle Physics & Astronomy Research Council (PPARC) took effect. The policy was adopted on October 19, 2006.

• December 1, 2006. IFLA and UNESCO released the IFLA/UNESCO Internet Manifesto Guidelines (dated September 2006), recommending open access as one way to implement the 2002 IFLA Internet Manifesto (see August [#2002 2002] above).

• December 3, 2006. The Australian Research Council (ARC) Funding Rules for 2008 ask grantees (in Rule 1.4.5.3) to deposit their ARC-funded work in an OA repository or explain why not.

• December 4, 2006. The School of Information Systems Computing and Mathematics at Brunel University adopted an open-access mandate for journal articles and dissertations.

• December 7, 2006. The Working Group on Libraries for India's National Knowledge Commission (NKC) recommended an OA mandate for publicly-funded research.

• December 8, 2006. The UK Office of Fair Trading concluded that the lack of OA to public data costs the country 500 million/year.

• December 9, 2006. Australia's National Health and Medical Research Council adopted a policy to encourage OA for NHMRC-funded research, and said it will soon ask non-complying grantees to justify their non-compliance.

• December 12, 2006. Bharathidasan University adopted an OA mandate for peer-reviewed journal articles by its faculty.

• December 13, 2006. A report from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities & Social Sciences (CCHSS) recommended an OA mandate, especially for publicly-funded research, and university support for OA and FRPAA.

• December 14, 2006. The European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) launched the EMBO Open hybrid journal program.

• December 14, 2006. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) issued Principles And Guidelines For Access To Research Data From Public Funding to implement its Declaration on Access to Research Data From Public Funding (January 2004).

• December 18, 2006. Australia's Department of Education, Science and Training allocated $25.5 million to build OA repositories at Australian universities as part of the country's new Research Quality Framework (RQF).

• December 21, 2006. The Public Library of Science (PLoS) officially launched PLoS ONE.