Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Wednesday, May 10, 2006

More on publisher opposition to FRPAA

Jeffrey Goldfarb, Publishers mobilize against US research proposal, Reuters, May 9, 2006. Excerpt:

Scientific and scholarly publishers including John Wiley...and Reed Elsevier...are launching an offensive against newly proposed U.S. legislation that would require them to make much of their research available for free within six months of publication....The proposal from two U.S. lawmakers opens a new front in a mounting global push to make taxpayer-funded research more widely accessible in what is a potential threat to publishers’ business models....

"Mandating that journal articles be made freely available on government Web sites so soon after their publication will be a powerful disincentive for publishers to continue these substantial investments," Brian Crawford, chairman of the professional publishers’ trade group, said on Tuesday. About 70 percent of a typical article’s usage value occurs after six months, Crawford said, citing independent librarian research and publishers’ own accounts. He said that publishers are already taking voluntary steps to make more research available and that they firmly oppose the legislation. They are calling instead for an independent study to scrutinize the potential effect the proposal might have on research quality and taxpayer costs. Individual publishers deferred comment to Crawford’s group, the Professional Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers (AAP)....

It was unclear whether [FRPAA] would advance this year, given that lawmakers have a shortened session because of the November congressional elections....

The push for open access to publicly funded research is growing in Europe, as well. A report for the European Commission earlier this year said that from 1975 to 1995 the price of scientific journals soared 300 percent more than the rate of inflation while subscriptions waned as library and researcher budgets were squeezed. The report’s authors, economists from two universities, recommended that research funded by European taxpayers be made freely available over the Internet.

PS: Because this article relies so heavily on the AAP position, see my 10-point rebuttal of that position, blogged earlier today.