The Royal Society's statement (below, with comments) is not only ill-informed, failing even to grasp what either Open Access or the proposed RCUK policy is about and for, but it is a statement for which the Royal Society (RS), a venerable and distinguished institution, will have profound reason to be ashamed in coming years. The RCUK proposed to require RCUK-funded -- i.e., publicly-funded, tax-payer-funded -- research journal articles to be made freely available online to all those would-be users world-wide who cannot afford access to the journal in which they were published. This is called Open Access (OA) self-archiving; it is a supplement to -- not a substitute for -- the existing peer-reviewed journal publishing system. And it has already been practised, and has co-existed peacefully, with the journal system for over a decade and half now (for researchers have been self-archiving their articles for at least that long), even in certain areas -- notably some branches of physics -- in which 100% of the articles are being self-archived immediately upon publication or even earlier, and have been for years. The physics publishers -- the American Physical Society and Institute of Physics Publishing -- have both reported publicly that they have detected no subscription decline at all as a result of self-archiving....This crucial distinction [between OA archiving and OA journals] is completely clouded over in the RS statement, and the self-archiving mandate keeps being treated as if it were an OA publishing mandate. The result is a large number of rather shrill and intemperate non sequiturs that do the RS no credit.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/24/2005 09:13:00 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.
