Richard Wray, Confused decision on science publishing, The Guardian, November 9, 2004. Excerpt: "The government yesterday threw away an opportunity to carry out a thorough review of the way scientific research is disseminated. Instead of engaging constructively with the Commons science and technology committee and assessing the potential impact of moves towards "open access" to research, the government - led by the department of trade and industry - sided with the traditional subscriptions-based journal publishers....The government is, of course, within its rights to ignore select committees, but it could at least have properly read the report compiled by chairman Dr Ian Gibson and his colleagues in July. As the committee said yesterday, "Even when taken on its own, the government response is clearly unsatisfactory. It fails to reply to the substance of some arguments and appears to misinterpret others." In short, the government's response seems to have been based on a non sequitur....The select committee's main recommendation was for public funders of research to mandate their researchers to archive their articles on the web. It also wanted government funding for a central body to co-ordinate a network of institutional repositories, which, potentially, would have opened up scientific research to all. In its response yesterday the government dismissed both roads to open access [OA journals and OA archiving]. But the rationale for dismissing self-archiving was based purely on arguments against author-pays publishing; traditional publishers had lobbied hard against the author-pays model." (PS: As I read the original report and the government response, Wray's analysis is exactly right.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/09/2004 10:09:00 AM.
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.
