The Association of American Publishers (AAP) has released a June 25 letter from a group of society publishers to members of Congress. The letter opposes appropriations bills now before Congress that would strengthen the NIH public access policy by converting it from a request to a requirement.
The publisher arguments are old, tired, and weak, and Congress now sees through them: an OA mandate at NIH will kill peer review; it will violate copyright; there's no need to compromise since publishers provide all the added value here and taxpayers none of it; European countries are not really adopting similar policies; researchers don't want it; the compliance rate with the current voluntary policy is not as dismal as it looks; and bad as the proposal is, it duplicates what publishers are already doing.
I won't write a detailed rebuttal to this letter. But for detailed rebuttals to very similar past letters, see my March 30, 2007, response to a March 26 AAP letter opposed to strengthening the NIH policy, or my May 10, 2006, response to a May 9 AAP letter opposed to FRPAA .
Note to researchers: If your society signed this letter and didn't discuss the question first in an open forum with members, then ask your leaders why not. Make your views known now --in blogs, discussion lists, emails to colleagues, society meetings, and society publications. Elect leaders who consult the membership on important policy questions, who want the society to act more like a research organization than a commercial publisher, and who will stop spending society funds to lobby Congress to thwart the public interest in public access to publicly-funded research.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 7/02/2007 04:48:00 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.
