The AAP has publicly released its May 23 letter to Sen. Susan Collins, Chair of the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, the Senate committee considering the FRPAA. Excerpt:
Our Executive Council is writing to you on behalf of member publishers within the Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers (AAP/PSP), as well as other concerned publishers among the undersigned, to express our strong opposition to S. 2695, the Federal Research Public Access Act....This unnecessary legislation would adversely impact the existing peer review system that ensures the high quality of scientific research in the United States. In addition, it would impose costly new mandates on federal agencies....
We hasten to point out that researchers who have access to US Government research funds also already have widespread access to our published information through their laboratories, universities, and private industry....As proposed, S.2695 represents an unfunded mandate that would be undertaken without compensation to the original publisher.
S. 2695 is unnecessary and duplicates existing mechanisms that enable the public to access scientific and medical journal research....
Peer review is a critical part of scientific publishing. It gives authors feedback on and validation of their analyses from other experts in their field....
In an environment of ever-shrinking budgets, we strongly believe every agency research dollar should be spent on scientific advancement and not on back-office administrative costs....
By depositing articles in databases with no access controls,
federal agencies would be asking the American taxpayer to subsidize the dissemination of information to anyone in the world with access to the internet-- including those corporations around the world that now are obliged to purchase information about US-funded research....
Comment. The bill is that bad and yet it duplicates what publishers are already doing. It would be terrible if peer review disappeared, but don't ask for the evidence that the bill would make peer review disappear. Public research money should be spent on research, even if the results are locked away for the economic benefit of a private-sector industry, even if a small investment would make them available to everyone who can use them, and even if the same agencies spend roughly 10 times the cost of this program on page charges and other subsidies for subscription journals. For more detail, see my 10-point rebuttal to the AAP's objections to the FRPAA.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/25/2006 08:30:00 PM.
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.
