Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Wednesday, May 31, 2006

Straight talk about OA and its critics

David Flaxbart, Public Science, Public Access, Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship, Spring 2006. An editorial. Excerpt:

Advocates for open access to the scientific literature were heartened recently by the surprising introduction of a Senate bill that would require most recipients of federal research funds to make their findings freely available within six months of publication. The "Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006" would expand and add teeth to the watered-down NIH policy which has been ignored by the vast majority of life scientists since its introduction in 2005. FRPAA is even more remarkable given that its co-sponsor, Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), is otherwise known for an aggressive pro-business stance.

Naturally, it didn't take long for the publishing industry's lobbyists, led by the eminently hissable American Association of Publishers, to shake off their cocktail-circuit stupor and begin frothing at the mouth at this dangerous exercise in socialist engineering. They immediately trotted out their tired and discredited mantras about the loss of subscription revenue, removal of investment incentives, and threats to peer review, in addition to the accusations that the government is trying to fix a system that -- for them at least -- isn't broken.

Brian Crawford, a vice president of the American Chemical Society, mouthed this ludicrous statement in an AAP press release: "Americans have easy access to scientific and medical literature through public libraries, state universities, existing private-sector online databases, as well as through their professional, academic, or business affiliations, [and] low-cost online individual article sales." While this absurd claim won't fool anybody with real-life experience, these and other inaccurate sound bites could be swallowed whole by politicians and policy makers inclined to oppose government intervention.

It is sad that some of the loudest anti-OA rhetoric is coming from some non-profit publishers and societies who should really know better by now, and whose pretense at protecting the integrity of science has long since been exposed as a ploy to protect their revenue streams.... Journals are actively abdicating any responsibility for investigating fraud, which further erodes their credibility (Altman 2006). Publishers' persistent defense of this tattered fig leaf of "added value" is starting to sound rather desperate....

The issue of public access to publicly funded science isn't going away, despite publishers' hopes to the contrary. Open access may not be the panacea to cure all the ills of a collapsing system, but it is vital that it be allowed to demonstrate its impact, good or bad, in a fair and objective arena. To that end, all stakeholders in the scholarly communication community should unite to support this bill and refute its knee-jerk detractors.