ALPSP has issued a public statement on open access. (It is dated August 27, 2003, but was released today.) Here it is in its entirety.
ALPSP is wholly in favour of maximizing access to research literature; the
various proposals for achieving this (e.g. Open Access journals,
institutional repositories, self-archiving), however, raise complex
economic, logistical and sociological questions which differ from field to
field as well as between different sizes and types of publishers. Much
more information needs to be gathered through experimentation and
analysis; ALPSP therefore welcomes the establishment of journals with
different economic models for open access in order that the benefit to
scholars and the long-term stability and viability of these models can be
assessed.
I applaud this statement. There are stronger endorsements of open access, but ALPSP supports the goal and it supports exploration of the best ways to achieve the goal. The call for more information is reasonable and addresses the concerns of many publishers who see the benefits of open access but who also want to steer their enterprises safely through these half-charted waters. I appreciate the way the statement encourages society publishers to experiment with open access for themselves rather than wait for others to provide the data. ALPSP is now closer to open access than many of its members, and we can hope that this act of leadership will inspire a wave of creative new experiments.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/27/2003 08:53:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
