Summary: Some publishers have suggested that because a 6-month embargo on Open Access self-archiving by authors is too long for researchers and too short for publishers, the FRPAA should instead pay publishers to provide the Open Access immediately. This is fine if the research funders have the extra cash to pay whatever price publishers are currently charging for this (it varies from under $500 to over $3000 today) or to impose a standardized cap on the price and pay that. But otherwise it makes more sense for authors to self-archive for themselves, at no cost, now, exactly as proposed by the FRPAA, and to allow the market to decide the price, if and when subscription revenues should ever prove unsustainable. There is no evidence at all of subscription revenue decline yet, as a consequence of self-archiving, even after 15 years in the fields where self-archiving has been practised the longest and effectively reached 100% years ago. The FRPAA should mandate that the deposit of all articles must be immediate (upon acceptance for publication), with only the Open-Access-setting (vs. Closed Access) open to embargo (capped at 6 months) from the 6% of journals that do not yet endorse immediate Open-Access-setting. Semi-automatized email-eprint requests made possible by the institutional repository softwares can provide for the needs of the researchers during the embargo period for articles in those journals.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/21/2006 04:42:00 PM.
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.
