AAP studies pros, cons of NIH-proposed 'open archive' to research, AAP News, November 2004. An unsigned opinion piece disguised as a news story. AAP News is from the American Academy of Pediatrics, not the Association of American Publishers, although you might not be able to tell the difference. This is another critique of the NIH OA plan built entirely on misunderstandings and misdirection, e.g. that NIH plan will force the conversion of non-OA journals to OA journals (unargued), that "author pays" journals are not economically sustainable (not at issue), and that "[p]ublishing the research output of NIH in an author-pays system could run into hundreds of millions of dollars annually" (not at issue).
(PS: The editorial encourages readers to submit their comments to the NIH before November 16, as do I. However, if readers submit this editorial's misunderstandings to the NIH, which knows better, then they will effectively discard their ballots and waste their time. As The Lancet put it in an October 16 editorial in reference to the other AAP: "In a statement about an earlier version of this policy, released by a US House of Representatives Appropriations Subcommittee, [Patricia Schroeder of the AAP] claims that if the idea were to be implemented unchanged, it 'would threaten the continued survival of many scientific, scholarly, and medical publications and professional societies'....But, as editors of a journal that publishes research funded by the NIH, we disagree with Schroeder's central claim. Widening access to research is unlikely to bring the edifice of scientific publishing crashing down. Schroeder provides no evidence that it would do so; she merely asserts the threat. This style of rebuttal will not do.")
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/01/2004 01:09:00 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.
