Scientific association, the Royal Society, is embroiled in controversy after it threw its backing behind commercial publishers and warned authors that open access will damage science.
Last month, a fierce debate developed on related list-servs and an open letter from 41 of its members demanded that the Royal Society withdraw its statement.
“Funders may be forcing scientific researchers to change the way they publish scientific papers so quickly that disastrous consequences could result,” the Royal Society states in its position statement on the Research Councils UK (RCUK) proposal that papers arising from publicly funded research should be placed in open access institutional repositories (IRs).
The eight research councils which make up the RCUK hope to have a final position statement by the end of January, which the Department of Trade and Industry will ratify....Fellows of the Society have reacted angrily with an open letter to Lord Martin Rees, president of the society, expressing their “disappointment” and accusing the society of trying to delay the implementation of the RCUK policy. This is the latest battle over RCUK policy, over the summer ALPSP and the RCUK clashed (full story here). “The Royal Society appears to be putting the concerns of existing publishers ahead of the needs of science,” the letter states.
Comment. The open letter from Fellows of the Royal Society in support of OA and the draft RCUK policy now contains 64 signatures, including six Nobel laureates. For links to the chief documents in this controversy, see my SOAN coverage from December and January.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/16/2006 09:42:00 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.
