Many have already commented on this statement - Peter Suber succinctly states the major fallacies in his Nov. 24 comments on Open Access News, where links to many other responses can be found. Some thoughtful replies can be found on the American Scientist Open Access Forum thread, Not a Proud Day in the Annals of the Royal Society, initiated by Barbara Kirsop. Here are a couple of notes on my perspective....The Royal Society asserts that the goal of OA advocates is: "to stop commercial publishers from making profits from the publication of research that has been funded from the public purse. While some companies do appear to be making excessive profits from the publication of researchers' papers..." Profits are not the issue, not even excessive profits! Access is the issue. Google is one commercial company that appears to be making lots of money from an open access approach, even if it's not primarily in the scholarly realm - kudos to google! BioMedCentral is a for-profit commercial open access publisher - I'm sure all OA advocates join me in wishing BMC nothing but success, including financial success. Where the confusion may stem from is where a few organizations - both commercial publishers and not-for-profits - appear to be prioritizing profits over dissemination of scholarly knowledge. The fight of the American Chemical Society against PubChem is an excellent example of this. Making profits providing good service in the public interest (providing peer review and optimum dissemination of scholarly research - whether as an OA publisher or by providing full self-archiving rights) is a good thing. Using one's profits to actively lobby against the public interest, is something else altogether....
The Royal Society states: "The Royal Society and other learned bodies currently use their publishing surpluses to fund activities such as academic conferences and public lectures..." This puzzles me, a little, and I would like to suggest a challenge for the Royal Society and other publishers following this approach. That is to say, in librarianship our associations run conferences on a cost-recovery or modest surplus basis, rather than subsidizing. We are not a well-funded discipline at all. Our associations need to keep membership fees and conference fees low, in order to be successful. If librarians can manage to make money from conferences, why does a well-funded discipline like chemistry need sudsidies?...
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/28/2005 08:57:00 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.
