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Britt Peterson, Taking aim at scientific journals, Seed, May 19, 2006. (Thanks to William Walsh.) Excerpt:
You might think that the results of publicly-funded taxpayer research would be freely available to the citizens who footed the bill in the first place, but you would be wrong --and perhaps in the mood to remedy the situation. That's the logic that motivated John Cornyn (R-TX) and Joe Lieberman (D-CT) to introduce...the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006...."Tax payer-funded research should be accessible to tax payers," said Sen. Lieberman in a press statement at the bill's introduction.... Comment. Olivieri is assuming (1) that FRPAA will undermine subscriptions, and (2) that without subscription-journals, nobody would perform peer review. There's no evidence for either contention and good reason to doubt both. For more details, see my 10-point rebuttal to the AAP's objections to FRPAA. Also see my comments on the report Olivieri co-authored last week. Eysenbach is right that when articles are OA from journals, there's little or no urgency for them to be OA from repositories as well. However, there are still some reasons to deposit them in repositories, e.g. for the security reasons that lead PLoS and BMC to deposit their OA articles in PMC, or for the processing and integration with OA databases provided by the NIH. If FRPAA isn't revised to handle cases in which articles are published in OA journals, then repository managers who think it's important to have certain articles on deposit can harvest them from the OA journals in which they were published. |