The Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) has issued a response to the RCUK draft OA policy. The document is dated Apil 19, 2005, but the ALPSP home page dates it June 30, 2005. Excerpt: 'ALPSP encourages the widest possible dissemination of research outputs; indeed, this furthers the mission of most learned societies to advance and disseminate their subject and to advance public education1. We understand the benefits to research of maximum access to prior work, although in the case of the general public we see little evidence of large-scale demand....However, ALPSP recognises that maximising access must be done in ways which do not undermine the viability either of the peer-reviewed journals in which the research is published, or of the societies and other publishers themselves, whose publishing surpluses may contribute substantially to the benefit of the discipline and its community in other ways....Publication in a journal adds not only the benefit of peer review (which is managed, though not conducted, by the publisher) but also editing and formatting for publication as well as important new functions such as the addition and verification of links to cited articles, data and other material....Understandably, therefore, they may not wish their 'value-added' version to be made freely available in repositories immediately on publication....Even if the freely available version lacks some or all of the value added by the publisher, it may be treated as an adequate substitute by uninformed readers (and, indeed, by cash-strapped libraries). And any new model which has the potential to 'siphon off' a significant percentage of otherwise paying customers will, understandably, undermine the financial viability of all these value-adding activities....The only way that repositories will help libraries with this problem is by enabling them to cease subscribing to some journals; if this happens, the journals will become unviable and will cease to exist. Alternative licensing and business models, which preserve the viability of the quality assurance and value-adding processes carried out by journals, are necessary if the system is not to be gravely damaged; these processes involve much more than the organisation and support of peer review, as outlined above....We therefore recommend that the Research Councils should respect the wish of some publishers to impose an embargo of up to a year (or, in exceptional cases, even longer) before self-archived papers should be made publicly accessible....It seems to us both inappropriate and unnecessarily wasteful of resources to create permanent archives of versions other than the definitive published versions of articles.'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 7/01/2005 09:32:00 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.
