Melissa Hagemann on the Open Access Movement
Interviewed by Sundar Raman for the Open Views series.
URL = http://kruufm.com/node/412
Description
"Melissa Hagemann, my guest today on Open Views, is the program manager for the Information Program at the OSI. Melissa was profiled as a Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) Innovator in December 2006 for her work promoting and facilitating Open Access.
Melissa could well be given the credit for the sucess of the Open Access movement. Considering the initiative is just over 5 years old, it's impressive that organizations as large as the National Institutes of Health are considering instituting that all the reseach they fund be released under an Open Access model and deposited into PubMed Central, the online digital library maintained by the NIH. Essentially this makes all NIH funded peer-reviewed articles completely freely available to anyone who wants it.
Melissa Hagemann is credited with being the strategist and visionary who brought all the disparate pieces of the scientific world into what is now a quite successful Open Access movement. With any global organization, particularly one taking on a well-established multi-billion-dollar publishing industry, there are issues to be resolved, and personalities to be juggled. Melissa's abilities to create the social network of scientists and researchers, and have them collaborate towards making their work available for no cost, online, to a global audience, is truly amazing considering the enormity of the task."