Free Our Books online. Campaign launch

We at The Internet for Activists head office (communal computer room at SOAS!)are pleased to announce the details of the launch of this very important campaign. We have re-arranged our timetable to accommodate the move of people from SOAS to IOE (just across the road. See you all there. This is the power of effective, combined online/ground activity.

Launch time: 1pm, Saturday 14th March 2009

Logan Hall, Institute of Education, University of London
20 Bedford Way, London WC1H 0AL.

Free Our Books – announcement (version 0.1)

Academic work is publicly funded. Both Research Councils UK (2005,2006) and a parliament commission (2004) recommended that all “Ideas and knowledge derived from publicly-funded research must be made available and accessible for public use, interrogation, and scrutiny, as widely, rapidly and effectively as practicable.”

Two universities have already implemented a version of such policy, through mandatory online open access self-archiving: Stirling (UK, 2007) and Harvard (USA, Feb 2008).

This campaign calls for this recommendation to be fully implemented across all academic institutions.

We believe that all academic research output has to be available online for public use free of charge through institutional mandatory self-archiving policies.

Most theoretical and ideological commitments to equality can not be implemented easily, this one can.

We call upon all academics and students to support this call for action by both putting their own work online immediately and by taking decisive further steps to make their departments and universities implement mandatory online open access self-archiving policies that would make all academic research outputs available online free of charge – this includes both books and journal papers.

Get involved: start a campaign at your institution, let us know about it, use our action pack to build the support and implement institutional policies.

Free Our Books: Make citizens' books and research papers available to them.

http://www.freeourbooks.org.uk/

Toni Prug (student, Queen Mary) and Clare Solomon (student, SOAS)