This winter has been colder than usual in many parts of the country, but in the open-access wars it's been a season of heated rhetoric. In January reports circulated in the journal Nature and in Scientific American that a division of the Association of American Publishers had hired a "pit bull" PR firm to help it respond to the threat posed by open access. Argue that "public access equals government censorship," the flaks reportedly advised.
Then, in February, an editor over at the Public Library of Science, a nonprofit group that publishes open-access journals, issued a call to arms on the group's blog: "For the sake of global scientific progress, human development, and poverty alleviation, it is surely time to end the slavery of traditional publishing."
A noticeably milder tone prevails in the Association of American University Presses' statement on open access, released last month. It neither embraces nor rejects the open-access revolution. Instead it calls for a broader, calmer approach, one that balances the virtues of the old and the new. And it asks that the discussion include the humanities and social sciences along with the scientific, technical, and medical fields that have been the primary focus of open-access campaigns, "lest an unfortunate new 'digital divide' should arise between fields and between different types of publishing." ...
Sanford G. Thatcher, director of Penn State University Press and principal author of the statement, says that in the middle is just where university presses belong. "We want to be an intermediary to bring different parties together, to engage in a more constructive dialogue than taking potshots at each other through PR agencies," he says....
Whereas many open-access proponents take what he calls a "gradualist evolutionary view," Mr. Thatcher wants publishers, universities, and scholars to be ready for rapid change if, say, the Federal Research Public Access Act passes....
For too long, Mr. Thatcher says, university presses have felt shut out of the debate. When the American Council of Learned Societies undertook a report on cyberinfrastructure in the humanities and social sciences last year, for instance, "we weren't part of the discussion from the beginning." Ditto with a recent investigation of copyright issues sponsored by Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. "They invited libraries and faculty, but they didn't invite any university-press people to comment on something that affects our operations substantially," Mr. Thatcher says....
The AAUP's statement appears to have struck a chord with [learned] societies.... "I was delighted with it," says William E. Davis, executive director of the American Anthropological Association, which publishes 22 scholarly, peer-reviewed journals. "It presented the issue that we are struggling with every day." He agrees with Mr. Thatcher that scholars must get more involved "as both consumers and producers of scholarship and help us figure out what might work."
Mr. Davis also directs the National Humanities Alliance Task Force on Open Access, which formed late last year. "We are struggling to help our member organizations figure out what kinds of alternative publishing models are out there that we might adopt or adapt to our own particular circumstances." The publishers' statement, he says, will help guide those discussions....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 3/14/2007 05:02:00 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.
