Excerpt from the August 5 letter: 'We are convinced that RCUK’s proposed policy will inevitably lead to the destruction of journals. A policy of mandated self-archiving of research articles in freely accessible repositories, when combined with the ready retrievability of those articles through search engines (such as Google Scholar) and interoperability (facilitated by standards such as OAI-PMH), will accelerate the move to a disastrous scenario. Librarians will increasingly find that ‘good enough’ versions of a significant proportion of articles in journals are freely available; in a situation where they lack the funds to purchase all the content their users want, it is inconceivable that they would not seek to save money by cancelling subscriptions to those journals. As a result, those journals will die. The consequences of the destruction of journals’ viability are very serious. Not only will it become impossible to support the whole process of quality control, including (but not limited to) peer review, but in addition, the research community will lose all the other value and prestige which is added, for both author and reader, through inclusion in a highly rated journal with a clearly understood audience and rich online functionality. This in turn will deprive learned societies of an important income stream, without which many will be unable to support their other activities – such as meetings, bursaries, research funding, public education and patient information – which are of huge benefit both to their research communities and to the general public....We absolutely reject unsupported assertions that self-archiving in publicly accessible repositories does not and will not damage journals. Indeed, we are accumulating a growing body of evidence that the opposite is the case, even at this early stage.' The letter then lists five examples of harm allegedly caused by OA archiving.
Update. The ALPSP withdrew its August 5 letter behind a password shortly after it was put online. On September 8, however, after a detailed rebuttal appeared online, ALPSP decided to release its letter to the public. To see it, use the updated link.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 8/08/2005 09:44:00 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.
