The Australian National University (ANU) has reportedly launched a new free online database that allows anyone with an Internet connection to read the latest scholarly work. The move is said to be in response to the soaring cost of accessing academic journals.
ANU's new Digital Collections facility makes around 400 theses, about 4,000 research papers and over 2,000 images freely accessible to all. The university's open access policy statement describes access to scientific and cultural advancements as a human right. It uses an open source software called Dspac, which is widely used by academic institutions with institutional repositories of scholarly work.
ANU joins an increasing number of academic institutions, such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, developing open access databases to make research available to those unable to pay high journal subscription fees.
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