Publishers Visit NIH To Protest Free Access Initiative, Library Journal, August 4, 2004. A short, unsigned news story on the NIH OA plan from the House Appropriations Committee. Excerpt: "While supporters of open access hailed a proposal by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to make all taxpayer-funded NIH research freely available within six months, more than 100 publishers yesterday visited the NIH offices to voice their strong opposition. Among their complaints: the NIH tucked the measure into an appropriations bill, which denied publishers, including society publishers, the opportunity to be heard on the issue. 'This measure caught publishers completely off-guard,' said Barbara Meredith, VP of Professional and Scholarly Publishing at the Association of American Publishers (AAP). 'This essentially mandates open access without any evidentiary hearings or studies.' The meeting was hosted by NIH Chairman Elias Zerhouni, and was the first in what is expected to be a number of hearings on the proposal, including, Meredith adds, a possible colloquy sponsored by the AAP. In response to publisher outcry, Rick Johnson, director of SPARC, in a letter sent to Zerhouni yesterday, suggested that NIH had made the right choice and that publishers appeared to 'misunderstand the proposal, which proposes open archiving, not open-access publication.' Open archiving, Johnson said, 'is not a threat to journals.' "
Posted by
Peter Suber at 8/03/2004 10:54:00 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.
