From: Richard Poynder <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 25 Mar 2013 10:52:13 +0100

During a two-day inaugural Global Summit on Merit Review held in
Washington last May — which was organised by the US National Science
Foundation (NSF) at the request of the White House Office of Science &
Technology (OSTP) — a new organisation called the Global Research
Council (GRC) came into being.

The first initiative of the GRC was to publish a Merit Review Statement.

Released at the end of the Washington summit, this outlines a set of
principles for assessing funding applications, including the need to
provide expert assessment, transparency, impartiality,
appropriateness, and confidentiality, as well as integrity and ethical
consideration.

But for Open Access (OA) advocates, a more interesting outcome of the
Washington summit was the news that the GRC had decided to take up the
issue of OA. As a result, at a second summit — to be held in Berlin at
the end of May — GRC will release consensus statements on both merit
review and OA.

But what exactly is GRC, how will it be funded, what is its remit, and
what precisely are its aspirations so far as Open Access is concerned?

To find out more I conducted an interview with Johannes Fournier, who
works for the German Research Foundation (DFG).

The interview can be read here:

http://poynder.blogspot.fr/2013/03/the-open-access-interviews-johannes.html


Richard Poynder