led to a new focus, namely understanding the social and economic benefits that ensue from these policies. This entails, for example, strengthening the economic competitiveness of a nation’s scientific enterprise and targeting selected R&D that will benefit from policies promoting the sharing of research resources. UNESCO’s support for open access reflects this new focus. “Scientific informa- tion is both a researcher’s greatest output and technological innovation’s most important resource. UNESCO promotes and supports Open Access—the online availability of scholarly information to everyone, free of most licensing and copyright barriers—for the benefit of global knowledge flow, innovation and socio-economic development.”6 While the understanding of the relationship between public access and the results of funded research, innovation, and economic competitiveness has deepened, there is a parallel movement to measure the actual return on investment of implementing these policies. Over the last two years, studies have been funded both in the US and abroad that explore the costs and benefits to national economies of policies that promote access to the results of research. Joseph details the different approaches undertaken in each of the studies and how these contribute to the policy debates concerning access to the results of funded research. The value of continuing to engage in these research efforts is key to the evolving public access policies. Conclusion The ARL Strategic Plan calls for ARL to influence “laws, public policies, regulations, and judicial decisions governing the use of copyrighted materials so that they better meet the needs of the educational and research communities” and to contribute “to reducing economic, legal, and technical barriers to access and use of the research results from publicly funded research projects, enabling rapid and inexpensive worldwide dissemination of facts and ideas.”7 To succeed, research libraries are dependent upon a non-discriminatory, robust, open, technological infrastructure that will permit effective use of resources under copyright, in the public domain, and under other legal regimes. Such an infrastructure must encourage emerging scholarly communication models that realize the benefits of networked-based technologies and reflect the interests of the academy and the public. RLI 273 6 Three Key Public Policies for Research Libraries ( C O N T I N U E D ) DECEMBER 2010 RESEARCH LIBRARY ISSUES: A BIMONTHLY REPORT FROM ARL, CNI, AND SPARC
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