Peter Suber has already sounded the right overall note by way of reply in OA News (see his 10 detailed points, much the same as mine, below):...
There is zero evidence that mandating self-archiving reduces subscription revenue....But even if self-archiving were ever to reduce subscription revenue, surely what is in the best interests of publishers' current revenue streams should not over-ride what is in the best interests of research and of the public that funds it....
AAP provides no evidence of how making research findings accessible for free to would-be users who cannot afford access would "seriously jeopardize the integrity of the scientific publishing process." AAP merely stipulate that it would....
Peer review is done by researchers, for free. Whoever funds the management of peer review and the certification of its outcome is a journal publisher. There is no evidence that self-archiving reduces subscription revenue but even if there should ever be such evidence it certainly does not follow that research and researchers should renounce the demonstrated benefits of self-archiving....
[M]any researchers cannot afford access to much needed research, and the proof of this is the fact that when subscription access is supplemented by author self-archiving, research usage and impact increase dramatically....Researchers do not now have nearly as much access as they need, because no research institution can afford all or most of the journals in which the research appears. The demonstrated impact advantage of self-archived research is the direct evidence of the substantial access shortfall there is for research that is not self-archived....
Nothing whatsoever is "expropriated": Publishers can continue to sell subscriptions and licenses for their paper and online editions, exactly as before. The author's self-archived final draft is not a substitute but a supplement, online only, for all would-be users who cannot afford the publisher's version. And so far there is no evidence whatsoever that self-archiving reduces subscription revenues at all, even in the areas that have been doing self-archiving the longest (15 years in high energy physics, even longer in computer science) and that are already at or near 100% self-archiving for years now....
[R]esearch is not funded, conducted and published in order to generate revenue for publishers, let alone in order to guarantee their current revenue streams and insulate them from any risk. In particular, what has already been demonstrated to be in the best interests of research outweighs what has not even been demonstrated to have any negative effects on the interests of publishers....
Surely it is not the business of American Association of Publishers to concern itself with the cost to tax payers of providing open access to government-funded research. But studies have indeed been done, across disciplines, and they have found that self-archived research has substantially higher research impact (25% - 250+%), and this translates into substantially higher return on the tax payers' investment in research than what they are getting for their research money today....[I]t is a self-serving red herring for publishers (in reality fretting about their own current revenue streams) to portray this as a "tax payer" issue....
Comment. The AAP is scatter-shooting bogus arguments. As Stevan and I have both demonstrated, it takes some time to show that none of them hits the target. If you're in doubt, work through the AAP critique again and one or both of our responses. If you're convinced (and if you're a US citizen or organization), please write to your Senators and ask them to support or even co-sponsor the FRPAA. They're being lobbied hard by the AAP, using just these bogus arguments. The Alliance for Taxpayer Access has some template letters that you can revise and adapt before sending.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/11/2006 09:41:00 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.
