Timeline 2007

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 2007. The US Education Resources Information Center (ERIC) announced a program to digitize 40 million pages of microfiche documents for OA.

• January 2007. The University of Amsterdam launched an Open Access fund to help cover publication fees charged by fee-based OA journals.

• January 4, 2007. Karger Medical and Scientific Publishers announced a hybrid OA program for eight of its journals.

• January 5, 2007. Emerald launched Emerald Asset (Accessible Scholarship Shared in an Electronic Environment), a no-fee hybrid OA program for its engineering journals.

• January 8, 2007. UK PubMed Central (UKPMC) was officially launched by a Funders Group of nine institutions. At the same time, eight of the nine members of the Funders Group announced that they do, or will, mandate OA for the research they fund and mandate deposit in UKPMC.

• January 8, 2007. The UK-based Arthritis Research Campaign (ARC) announced an OA mandate for ARC-funded research.

• January 8, 2007. The Chief Scientist Office of the Scottish Executive Health Department announced an Conditions of a Research Grant.doc OA mandate for CSO-funded research.

• January 8, 2007. The UK Department of Health pledged to adopt an OA mandate. I'm not sure when it actually adopted and released its policy, but it was at least by May 2007.

• January 8, 2007. The British Heart Foundation pledged to adopt an OA mandate. I'm not sure when it actually adopted and released its policy, but it was at least by May 2007.

• January 8, 2007. Cancer Research UK pledged to adopt an OA mandate. It released its policy on May 21, 2007.

• January 9, 2007. Open Access Research issued a call for papers and became the first peer-reviewed OA journal devoted to OA itself.

• January 11, 2007. The University of Michigan Press launched a new OA imprint, Digital Cultural Books. Books in the series will appear in both OA editions and priced, printed editions.

• January 17, 2007. The UN Convention on Long-range Transboundary Air Pollution (LRTAP) added a policy mandating OA to data covered by the convention, with some exceptions.

• January 10, 2007. The European Research Advisory Board (EURAB) recommended an OA mandate for EU-funded research.

• January 24, 2007. Nature revealed that the Association of American Publishers (AAP) hired Eric Dezenhall ("the pit bull of public relations") to keep OA proponents "on the defensive" with messages like "public access equals government censorship". Dezenhall reportedly asked for $300,000 - 500,000 for six months of work.

• January 25, 2007. The Biblioteca del Congreso Nacional del Chile (National Library of Chile) released all its (digital?) content under Creative Commons licenses.

• January 26, 2007. The European University Association's Working Group on Open Access released a Statement on Open Access, endorsing an EU-wide OA mandate.

• January 26, 2007. The US Department of Energy (DOE) and the British Library agreed to build an OA portal of world science.

• January 29, 2007. The Alexandria Archive Institute officially launched Open Context, its OA repository and portal for archaeological data.

• January 31, 2007. The American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) released a position statement on public access to scientific literature, calling for OA to publicly funded research within six months of its publication.

• January 31, 2007. The European Research Council revealed, in its grant application guidelines, that it will pay publication fees at fee-based OA journals.

• February 2007. AlouetteCanada, the digitization and OA project for Canadian cultural heritage, issued a Declaration that includes language supporting OA.

• February 2007. India's National Centre for Science Information launched CASSIR (Cross Archive Search Services for Indian Repositories). At the time of launch, CASSIR indexed 15 of India's OA, OAI-compliant repositories and was working to index the rest.

• February 8, 2007. The e-Infrastructure Working Group of the UK Office of Science and Innovation (OSI) issued a report endorsing the RCUK's OA mandate. (OSI is a branch of the UK Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), which opposed an OA mandate for the UK.)

• February 12, 2007. The Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) released a draft Provosts' Statement On Publishing Agreements. It includes an author addendum enabling scholars to retain the rights they need to authorize postprint archiving.

• February 13, 2007. A group of publishers and publisher associations released the anti-OA Brussels Declaration on STM Publishing.

• February 13, 2007. The Directory of Open Access Journals launched a membership program.

• February 14, 2007. A group of writers released version 1.0 of its Definition of Free Cultural Works.

• February 15, 2007. FreeCulture.org and the Alliance for Taxpayer Access declared February 15, 2007, to be a National Day of Action for Open Access and FRPAA.

• February 15, 2007. OA proponents delivered a petition with over 20,000 signatures to Janez Potocnik, EU Commissioner for Science and Research. The petition called for guaranteed public access to publicly-funded research in Europe.

• February 15, 2007. Students at Harvard College Free Culture launched an OA Thesis Repository for undergraduate senior theses.

• February 16, 2007. The European Commission (EC) released its long-awaited, non-binding Communication on access to scientific information in the digital age along with a Staff Working Paper and FAQ. These docucments form the EC response to an earlier EC-commissioned recommendation for an OA mandate (dated January 2006, released April 2006).

• February 21, 2007. Hindawi Publishing converted the last of its subscription-based journals to OA and became an OA-only publisher.

• February 23, 2007. The University of Bremen released its Science Plan 2010, which endorsed the goal of providing open access and creating the infrastructure needed for it.

• February 24, 2007. Ronald Plasterk, one of the best-known OA proponents in the Netherlands, was appointed the country's minister of education, culture, and science.

• February 24, 2007. Creative Commons launched the 3.0 versions of its licenses.

• February 27, 2007. The ATLAS Experiment at CERN released a Statement on Open Access Publishing encouraging its 1,800 participating scientists to publish their results in OA journals. (CERN scientists were already operating under an OA archiving mandate.) Three other CERN experiments soon adopted the same statement: the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment (March 2, 2007), A Large Ion Collider Experiment (ALICE), and Total Cross Section, Elastic Scattering and Diffraction Dissociation at the LHC (TOTEM) (both the latter c. March 20, 2007).

• February 27, 2007. The American Association of University Presses (AAUP) released a Statement on Open Access. It expresses some skepticism about fee-based OA journals and a willingness to explore mixed business models and OA monographs.

• February 28, 2007. The Research Information Network (RIN) published a document, for Public Policy - Scholarly Communications Statement of Principles.pdf Research and the Scholarly Communications Process: Towards Strategic Goals for Public Policy: A Statement of Principles, which has been signed by an unusual combination of friends and foes of OA.

• March 2007. ChemXSeer launched, an OA database and search engine for chemical literature, formulae, tables, and data. One of the co-developers was C. Lee Giles, who was also one of the co-developers of CiteSeer.

• March 1, 2007. SURF announced that all the universities in the Netherlands had now signed the Berlin Declaration.

• March 8, 2007. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) and Elsevier agreed that when HHMI-funded authors publish in Elsevier journals, HHMI will pay Elsevier between $1,000 and $1,500 per article to deposit the peer-reviewed but unedited manuscripts in PubMed Central six months after publication. (Also see SOAN for April 2007.)

• March 9, 2007. CERN released its plan to convert all the subscription journals in particle physics to OA.

• March 12, 2007. Polimetrica released an Open Access Manifesto, apparently the first from a book publisher.

• March 14, 2007. The Universite de Liege adopted an OA mandate.

• March 16, 2007. MIT canceled access to the digital library of the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) when the SAE refused to lift its onerous DRM.

• March 19, 2007. Elias Zerhouni, Director of the NIH, told a Senate committee that the NIH public access policy should be strengthened from a request to a requirement.

• March 20, 2007. Nature Biotech announced a new policy, "recommending that raw data from proteomics and molecular-interaction experiments be deposited in a public [OA] database before manuscript submission."

• March 27, 2007. The university press (Universitatsverlag Ilmenau) of the Ilmenau Technical University (Technische Universitat Ilmenau) began publishing each of its books in dual editions, one OA and one priced/printed.

• March 27, 2007. The Australian government Productivity Commission released a report proposing an 'author pays' OA journal mandate. (See my blog comments.)

• March 31, 2007. The Task Force on Electronic Publication for the American Philological Association (APA) and the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) endorsed OA archiving and OA publication of previously microfiched works.

• April 2007. JISC adopted an OA mandate for JISC-funded research in the April 2007 version of its grant guidelines.

• April 2007. Open Access Law Canada started its work to help bring OA to Canadian legal research.

• April 2007. The American Geophysical Union launched a hybrid OA program for most of its 19 journals.

• April 2007. The Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories (APSR) launched Online Research Collections Australia (ORCA), a registry and support network for OA repositories in Australia.

• April 2007. The Canadian Breast Cancer Research Alliance (CBCRA) decided to encourage rather than require OA for CBCRA-funded research.

• April 1, 2007. Two Research Councils of the UK merged, one requiring OA (PPARC) and one merely encouraging it (CCLRC). The new merged entity, Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), will require OA.

• April 2, 2007. We learned that France's Institut national de recherche en informatique ete en automatique (INRIA) deposited its entire research output in HAL, the centralized French OA repository.

• April 4, 2007. Canada's Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) launched a funding program to support OA journals.

• April 4, 2007. JISC and the University of Glasgow launched OpenLOCKSS, a new program to use LOCKSS for preserving OA journals.

• April 6, 2007. The chief Flemish research agency, Research Foundation - Flanders (Fonds voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek - Vlaanderen, or FWO), adopted an OA mandate for FWO-funded research.

• April 10, 2007. The European Commission adopted an FP7 Grant Agreement which requires grantees to submit electronic copies of their journal articles to the EC and permits the EC to redistribute them online.

• April 13, 2007. EDINA, JISC, and SHERPA launched the Depot, a universal OA repository for UK researchers.

• April 13, 2007. BioMed Central announced the first three OA journals from its offshoot, PhysMath Central.

• April 13, 2007. The EU's eContentPlus program issued its 2007 Work Programme, which endorsed OA and called for funding proposals in areas that include OA.

• April 18, 2007. Turkey's Middle East Technical University adopted an OA mandate.

• April 18, 2007. Bentham Science Publishers announced plans to launch 300 OA journals before the end of 2007.

• May 2007. The UK Medical Research Council and British Heart Foundation, which both already had OA mandates, joined with a of (unnamed) pharmaceutical and analytical science companies to set up a 17 million fund for research into biomarkers. The fund will operate under an OA mandate.

• May 2007. The Norwegian Open Research Archive (NORA) and the Norwegian Digital Library launched OpenAccess.no, a central location for OA information and advocacy in Norway.

• May 2, 2007. The Central Economics and Mathematics Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences adopted an Economics and Mathematics Institute of Russian Academy of Sciences OA mandate.

• May 2, 2007. A consortium of German universities officially launched the Informationsplattform Open Access, a nationwide platform for information on OA in Germany (online since September 2006).

• May 3, 2007. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Department of Energy (DOE) both called for OA to publicly-funded research.

• May 3, 2007. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign adopted the Author Addendum drafted by the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC).

• May 3, 2007. The University of Minnesota adopted the Author Addendum drafted by the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC).

• May 7, 2007. The University of Wisconsin at Madison adopted the Author Addendum drafted by the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC).

• May 11, 2007. We learned that Pakistan is creating a portal that will provide OA to all journals published in the country.

• May 16, 2007. The Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe recommended "wide public access to research results to which no copyright restrictions apply" (i.e. data).

• May 17, 2007. SPARC and Science Commons announced a consolidation and enhancement of their author addenda.

• May 23, 2007. The German non-profit Netzwerk Freies Wissen (NFW) released sign-on declaration, For better development and just access to knowledge in all forms. The release date was chosen to coincicde with the first day of the G8 ministers meeting in Munich.

• May 23, 2007. A bill was introduced in the Brazilian Parliament to mandate that public universities mandate OA to their research output. At the samem time, Brazilian OA advocates began circulating a petition to support the bill.

• May 25, 2007. Spain's Ministry of Culture began funding OA repositories throughout the country.
• June 2007. The UK Medical Research Council added a data access policy to its larger open access policy.

• June 2007. Spain's Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas (or Spanish National Research Council, CSIC) converted 12 of its 32 journals to OA and plans to convert the rest.

• June 2007. Sweden's OpenAccess.se launched a project to improve the infrastructure for the nation's research output and at the same time to increase the OA portion of that output.

• June 2007. The Hong Kong Research Grants Council (RGC) decided to encourage rather than require OA for RGC-funded research.

• June 6, 2007. The University of Nottingham set up an OA publishing fund.

• June 7, 2007. Nature launched three free online resources at once: Nature Reports Climate Change, Nature Reports Stem Cells, and Nature Precedings. The last is a preprint exchange for biology, medicine, chemistry, and geoscience, using CC licenses, DOIs, RSS feeds, and Web 2.0 features like user tags, ratings, and discussions.

• June 12, 2007. Nature launched Scintilla, an OA news aggregator for RSS and Atom feeds. It supports user ratings, recommendations, and interest groups.

• June 21, 2007. Springer and the Dutch library consortium UKB (Universiteitsbibliotheken en de Koninklijke Bibliotheek) announced a joint OA initiative. Springer's OA hybrid journals will waive their publication fees for authors from UKB institutions, and these OA articles may appear immediately in the institutional repositories of UKB institutions.

• June 22, 2007. The US Department of Energy launched WorldWideScience.org (previously called Science.World), an OA portal and federated search engine for scientific research in 15 countries.

• June 26, 2007. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) announced its long-anticipated OA mandate for research publications by HHMI employees.

• June 26, 2007. The German government started using public money to fund scientific articles for the German Wikipedia.

• June 27, 2007. Lisbet Rugtvedt, Norway's State Secretary for the Ministry of Education and Research, publicly endorsed OA.

• June 28, 2007. Lund University launched Journal Info, an online tool to help scholars evaluate journals where they might submit their work. It covers OA and non-OA journals, and for non-OA journals recommends some OA alternatives and indicates the journal's self-archiving policy, subscription price per article, and subscription price per citation.

• June 29, 2007. The Canadian Library Association announced plans to convert most of its publications to OA and encourage its members to self-archive.

• June 29, 2007. The American Physiological Society (APS) adopted a hybrid OA journal program (Author Choice) for 10 of its journals.

• July 2007. The Audiovisual Communications Laboratory at Switzerland's Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) adopted an OA policy for its publications and data in order to facilitate the reproducibility of its results.

• July 3, 2007. Google relaxed a restriction on some of its digitized public-domain books, offering plain-text editions alongside the scanned images. Plain-text editions support cutting and pasting and adaptive technologies for visually impaired users.

• July 10, 2007. The Nereus consortium of European academic libraries announced the September launch an OA economics research portal called NEEO (Network of European Economists Online).

• July 17, 2007. The Open Library, from the Open Content Alliance, launched a working demo and described its plans for a wiki-like universal catalog.

• July 19, 2007. Professional Engineering Publishing (PEP) launched a hybrid OA program for all 19 of its journals.

• July 26, 2007. Oxford University Press (OUP) reduced the subscription prices on 28 of its hybrid ("Oxford Open") journals to reflect rising levels of author uptake --for the second year in a row.

• July 30, 2007. The Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) launched a hybrid OA policy for its journal, Learned Publishing.

• August 2007. Google's program to share data with researchers includes a rule requiring OA for the research results.

• August 2007. The National Science Foundation, Public Library of Science, and the San Diego Supercomputing Center launched SciVee ("YouTube for scientists"), which broadcasts OA videos explaining OA articles.

• August 2007. The Irish Research Council for Science, Engineering & Technology (IRCSET) issued a strong draft OA mandate and called for public comments.

• August 2, 2007. UNESCO released the final version of the Kronberg Declaration on the Future of Knowledge Acquisition and Sharing. (It released a draft in July 2007.)

• August 8, 2007. Germany's DINI (Deutsche Initiative fur Netzwerkinformation) launched OA-Netzwerk to share best practices and improve the data quality of the national network of OA repositories.

• August 11, 2007. The University of Wisconsin at Madison launched a Library Fund for Open Access Publishing.

• August 12, 2007. The German Research Society (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft or DFG) announced a funding program to launch new science journals, expand existing journals, and help print journals make the transition to electronic publication. To be eligible for funding, journals must meet the DFG guidelines for open access.

• August 20, 2007. Athabasca University launched the OA-focused Athabasca University Press.

• August 21, 2007. Blake Stacey launched Eureka Science Journal Watch, a wiki to track science journals and their progress toward OA. Eureka is a more general version of its predecessor, MathSciJournalWiki.

• August 23, 2007. The Association of American Publishers (AAP) Professional/Scholarly Publishing (PSP) division launched PRISM (Partnership for Research Integrity in Science & Medicine) to lobby against government OA policies.

• August 23, 2007. Columbia Law School and the University of Colorado Law School launched AltLaw.org, an OA portal of US case law.

• September 2007. India's National Knowledge Commission (NKC) released a report recommending an OA mandate for publicly-funded research, public funding for OA digitization projects, and a funding model to support OA journals. (The release date of the report is not clear.)

• September 1, 2007. The OA mandate at the Swiss National Science Foundation took effect.

• September 4, 2007. The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) announced an OA mandate for CIHR-funded research.

• September 6, 2007. The UK Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) announced an OA mandate for AHRC-funded research.

• September 8, 2007. Elsevier launched OncologySTAT, a portal offering free online access to 101 of its oncology journals.

• September 10, 2007. The CNRS' Institut de physique nucliaire et de physique des particules (IN2P3) agreed to pay the publication fees for French physicists who publish OA articles in the Journal of High Energy Physics.
• September 10, 2007. The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) converted its large database of ITU standards to OA.

• September 20, 2007. The Boston Library Consortium of 19 libraries joined the Open Content Alliance. It preferred the OCA to the Google Library project because the OCA provided full OA to the digitized files.

• September 24, 2007. The Open Knowledge Foundation released a draft open data license for public comment.

• September 26, 2007. The Harvard University Faculty Council approved a plan to make OA archiving the default for all research articles produced by faculty. The plan still has to be approved by the faculty. (On October 16, Stuart Shieber introduced the motion to the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences.)

• September 26, 2007. The final report from an NSF-JISC workshop strongly endorsed an OA mandate for publicly-funded research.

• September 27, 2007. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) agreed to pay the publishing fees when HHMI-funded researchers publish in Springer's hybrid OA journals.

• September 28, 2007. WIPO adopted 45 reform proposals that will modify the organization's mission and advance access to knowledge.

• October 2007. MIT geophysicist Brian Evans drafted a resolution for the MIT Faculty Committee on the Library System calling on MIT faculty to provide OA to their own work, especially when it is based on public funding.

• October 2007. Elsevier released the license it will use when it deposits articles in PubMed Central (PMC) or UKPMC on behalf of funding agencies who pay it to do so. It's notable for permitting a range of re-use rights as well as free online access.

• October 2007. The Australian government proposed an Australian National Data Service (ANDS) to promote OA, preservation, and re-use of publicly-funded research data.

• October 1, 2007. The NIH launched SHARe (SNP Health Association Resource), "one of the most extensive collections of genetic and clinical data ever made freely available to researchers worldwide."

• October 4, 2007. The University of Gottingen and Springer agreed all articles by Gottingen faculty published in Springer journals will be OA under the Springer Open Choice program.

• October 8, 2007. The UKPMC Publishers Panel, composed of publishers and research funders, agreed that when funders pay publishers to make an article OA, then the publishers should remove key permission barriers as well as price barriers.

• October 10, 2007. Sweden joined a Nordic project funded by Nordbib to launch new OA journals and convert existing TA journals to OA.
• October 17, 2007. Six Brazilian university rectors met at the University of Brasilia to launch a campaign across Brazil and other Portuguese-speaking countries to persuade research institutions to adopt strong, local OA policies.

• October 17, 2007. Jon Ippolito and Craig Dietrich released ThoughtMesh, an OA distribution system optimized for tag-based discovery.

• October 18, 2007. Fourteen European university rectors met at the University of Liege to launch EurOpenScholarship, a campaign to persuade European research institutions to adopt strong, local OA policies.

• October 19, 2007. The Social Science Research Network officially launched the Humanities Research Network, a collection of OA repositories in different fields of the humanities.

• October 19, 2007. Library and Archives Canada released its new digital information strategy for public comments. The draft (Section 3.3) calls for open access to publicly-funded research.

• October 20, 2007. The Open Content Alliance announced its plan to digitize and lend orphan works, its first foray beyond public-domain books.

• October 29, 2007. The Universite Libre de Bruxelles announced its program to publish OA editions of its out-of-print books.

• October 31, 2007. WorldSciNet launched WorldSciNet Open Access, a hybrid OA journal program that applies to all 133 journals published by WorldScientific and all eight journals published by Imperial College Press.

• November 2007. Italy's Conference of University Rectors (Conferenza dei Rettori delle Universite Italiane) adopted guidelines for the deposit of electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) in institutional repositories, which it regards as the first step in a plan to make Italian ETDs OA.

• November 2007. Norway adopted a policy requiring government agencies to provide OA to any geodata they gather or produce.

• November 2007. The New Zealand government and National Library of New Zealand launched the Kiwi Research Information Service (KRIS), which will harvest New Zealand's institutional repositories.

• November 5, 2007. The Swedish Research Council announced plans for a Swedish National Data Service (SND), an OA harvester of the country's databases in the social sciences, epidemiology, and the humanities. It will be hosted at Gothenburg University.

• November 8, 2007. JISC and UKOLN launched SWORD 1.0 (Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit).

• November 10, 2007. The World Health Organization (WHO) Intergovernmental Working Group on Public Health, Innovation and Intellectual Property (IGWG) was considering an OA mandate until November, when it issued a new draft merely encouraging, not requiring, OA.

• November 14, 2007. France's National Agency for Research (Agence nationale de la recherche, or ANR) adopted an OA mandate for ANR-funded research.

• November 16, 2007. SPARC Europe and the DOAJ announced a project to develop standards for OA journals and provide help to publishers in meeting those standards.

• November 20, 2007. Sage and Hindawi struck a deal to launch a new line of full OA journals, marking Sage's first foray into gold OA.

• November 23, 2007. The Council of the European Union released a set of Conclusions on access to research. The document "underlines...the importance" of OA to publicly-funded research, but stopped short of recommending a policy to insure it.

• November 29, 2007. The Cape Town Open Education Declaration made a "soft launch" in order to collect signatures before its official launch in mid-January 2008.

• November 29, 2007. The University of Pittsburgh Press announced that it was working with the University Library System to provide OA to all 500 books on the press' backlist. For new books, it will start with a non-OA edition and add an OA edition after two years.

• December 2007. The Flanders Marine Institute (Vlaams Instituut voor de Zee, or VLIZ) adopted a Marine Institute policy to deposit the Institute's research output in its OA repository, the Open Marine Archive (Open Marien Archief, or OMA).

• December 2007. A research group from the University of Granada launched SCImago, an OA database of journal data organized by field and country.