Written Evidence to 2003 House of Commons Science and Technology Committee

The UK should maximise the benefits to the British tax-payer from the research it funds by mandating not only (as it does now) that all findings should be published, but also that open access to them should be provided, for all potential users, through either of the two available means: (1) publishing them in open-access journals (whenever suitable ones exists) (5%) and (2) publishing the rest (95%) in toll-access journals whilst also self-archiving them publicly on their own university's website. (1) Open access (worldwide) to UK research output maximises the impact (ie, visibility, usage, application, citation) of UK research output, enhancing the productivity and progress of UK (and worldwide) research, thereby maximising the return on the UK tax-payer's support for research. (2) The unified open-access provision strategy supported by the Budapest Open Access Initiative, the Berlin Declaration, and other such current movements involves two complementary strategies OAJ and OAA: (OAJ) Researchers publish their research in an open-access journal if a suitable one exists, otherwise (OAA) they publish it in a suitable toll-access journal and also self-archive it in their own research institution's open-access research archive. So why is the Science and Technology Committee inquiry into scientific publications considering only open access journals (OAJ), rather than also considering, at least as seriously, mandating university-based provision of open access to their own (peer-reviewed, published) research output (OAA)? (3) It would be a great mistake (and the press release already suggests some risk of making it) if open-access provision were to be mistakenly identified only, or even primarily, with OAJ (open access journal publishing). There are still far too few open-access journals, whereas OAA self-archiving has the power to provide immediate open access for all the rest of UK research output. The UK government can do a great deal to maximise the access to and the impact of UK research output through government research funding policies and through HEFCE influence over academic institutional policy through research assessment and funding, in particular, by extending existing publish-or-perish policy to mandate open-access provision. (4) What parliament should mandate is accordingly open-access provision for all funded research

SoFAR with DIM Agents: An agent framework for Distributed Information Management

In this paper we present SoFAR, a versatile multi-agent framework designed for Distributed Information Management tasks. SoFAR embraces the notion of proactivity as the opportunistic reuse of the services provided by other agents, and provides the means to enable agents to locate suitable service providers. The contribution of SoFAR is to combine some ideas from the distributed computing community with the performative-based communications used in other agent systems: communications in SoFAR are based on the startpoint/endpoint paradigm, which is the foundation of Nexus, the communication layer at the heart of the Computational Grid. We explain the rationale behind our design decisions, and describe the predefined set of agents which make up the core of the system. Two distributed information management applications have been written, a general query architecture and an open hypermedia application, and we recount their design and operations