Friday 24 May 2013

Elevators and Open Access science

Kone is a Finnish company "dedicated to people flow" (it makes escalators, elevators and other machinery). But Kone also has a foundation that finance research in Science, Humanities and Art, Kone foundation (or Koneen Säätiö).
I really like Koneen Säätiö because my salary as postdoctoral researcher in the laboratory of Genetics at the University of Turku is paid through a grant they gave to Niklas Wahlberg
I like it more now because they started to support the Open Access movement in scientific publishing. They sent an email to grant holders a couple of days ago saying the following:

Koneen Säätiö suosittelee tutkijoilleen tieteellisten julkaisujen avointa saatavuutta

Which means, more or less, that "the Kone foundation recommends that scientist should publish open access papers".

This is a Google Translation from the rest of the recommendation:


Science transparency and open access to scientific publications not only benefit the researchers and their research institutions, but also high-quality research funders. This has been noticed in recent years, both the U.S. and the UK and other European countries. So private, such as the Wellcome Trust, and public, funders, such as the Research Councils in the UK, have begun to instruct and funded researchers to bring the scientific publications openly available.

Kone Foundation reportedly the first to start foundation in Finland recommended that the research funded by the results achieved through the network may be open for reading. This decided the Foundation's Board of Directors spring meeting.
Open access can be accomplished by storing items such as your university's open access archives such as the Academia.edu wider service. The results may also be published in scientific journals, in which they will be openly available.

The Foundation may, in connection with the project financing to fund open access to the so-called scientific publications. author fees. However, it is desirable that the writer is paid to publications in which all the scientific articles are openly available, and for those who collect the subscription fees.

Well, it is good that the local company making elevators is pushing scientists to publish their output in Open Access venues.