The publisher lobby can defeat the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) (to mandate self-archiving of all federally funded research so as to make it freely accessible online) if FRPAA is promoted...mainly as a means of providing public (student, practitioner, patient, general public) access to publicly funded research. Publishers...will argue...that the public does not really want or need access to most of this specialized peer-reviewed journal literature, across all fields...written by and for specialized researchers, and that it is hence not justified to put publishers' subscription revenues at potential risk by mandating that it must be made freely accessible online. Instead, publishers will propose special arrangements in which they themselves would make the tiny fraction of what they publish that is of potential public interest freely accessible online. The right response to this by FRPAA proponents is to make it very explicit that the primary purpose of the bill is not public READS, but "CURES" -- i.e., the public benefits that come from applying and building upon research findings in further research and practical applications, for the sake of which the research was publicly funded in the first place. And CURES come from researcher access and usage -- researchers applying and building upon current research in further research and applications -- not from public access and usage. Because no researcher can currently afford access to anywhere near all the research they might need to read and use, researcher self-archiving substantially accelerates and increases research usage and impact, which is the measure of speed and progress toward CURES. And substantially accelerating and increasing progress toward CURES -- unlike providing public READS -- does outweigh any hypothetical risk to publisher revenues (although there is as yet absolutely no evidence that self-archiving reduces subscription revenues.) Moreover, with free online access (Open Access) to self-archived research, the public (students, practitioners, patients, tax-payers) get full access too, as a secondary benefit, but not because that is the primary benefit from or justification for mandating Open Access self-archiving....
Comment. Note that Stevan is here using "CURES" as shorthand for all the benefits of OA research, in medicine as well as in other fields. Don't confuse it with the CURES Act, a bill before Congress that would mandate OA to publicly-funded medical research.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/13/2006 11:11:00 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.
