A group of eight UK academics that includes Tim Berners-Lee, who created the world wide web, has called for all publicly funded research to be made freely available on the internet. In an open letter to the Research Councils UK (RCUK) the group is highly critical of the Association of Learned and Professional Society, which represents non-profit academic publishers and which has opposed such moves to open access. The society claimed that a proposal by RCUK --a strategic partnership of the United Kingdom’s eight research councils-- that all research papers resulting from its funding should be archived on the internet "will accelerate the move to a disastrous scenario." This scenario, the society said, would bring financial ruin to many journals as librarians cancel subscriptions and would lead to the collapse of quality controls and peer review processes....The group of academics has hit back at the Association of Learned and Professional Society, saying that many of the society’s claims are unsubstantiated. "All the evidence to date shows the reverse to be true: not only do journals thrive and coexist alongside author self-archiving, but they can actually benefit from it --both in terms of more citations and more subscriptions." They say that many researchers are currently hampered in their work because they don’t have access to all the articles they need, as no institution can afford to subscribe to all the journals its users need. "Due to the current constraints on the accessibility of research results, the potential for British scholarship is not being maximised currently," the group wrote in its letter. "Yet the constraints on accessibility can now, in the digital age, be eliminated completely, to the benefit of the UK economy and society, exactly in the way RCUK has proposed." The letter includes a line by line critique of the society’s reasons for opposing open access. It gives physics as an example of an area in which open access has not been detrimental to traditional publishing.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 9/02/2005 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.
