Eight major North American library associations have publicly released their May 31 letter supporting the OA recommendations in the EC report on STM publishing and OA in Europe. Excerpt:
Collectively, we wish to convey our enthusiastic support for the actions proposed in
Recommendation A1 to “guarantee public access to publicly funded research results
shortly after publication.” The issues around public access are of great concern to the
members of our associations. We have been leaders in supporting and encouraging
similar actions in the United States and Canada....
While we strongly endorse the goals of the National Institutes of Health (NIH)
public access policy, we want to highlight some features that are unnecessarily
limiting the policy’s effectiveness. We submit that the success of the NIH policy
relies on making author submission mandatory and requiring that NIH-funded
works are made publicly available in PubMed Central within six months of
publication. These are also the recent recommendations of the NIH’s own Public Access Working Group (PAWG) and the National Library of Medicine Board of
Regents. We are confident that reliable evidence shows that a six-month embargo poses no substantial danger to existing publishers relying on subscription-based revenues.
We commend to you the approach to public access embodied in the Federal Research
Public Access Act of 2006 (S.2695)....
Further, our organizations strongly support the analysis in Section seven regarding
journal business models and the consequent Recommendation A2 that a level playing
field is needed to allow for the creation of a more competitive marketplace. The study
correctly notes that funding bodies substantially subsidize subscription-based funding
models, albeit largely indirectly, and should equally subsidize models using author-side
payments....Concerns are raised in the Study regarding the presumed potential of author-side
payment models to compromise current quality standards exercised by journals. It
should be noted that there is no evidence available indicating a lowering of quality
standards among journals using author-side payment models....
[P]ay-per-use models [introduce price sensitivity] only at the price of
continued disparities in access to research and consequent losses of productivity. Open
access, while perhaps less familiar, strongly reflects the historic ethos of sharing within
the research community as well as the emerging norms of Internet-based
communication systems. It provides the best opportunity to maximize the return on
public investment in research by sweeping away virtually all access barriers. The
leverage this offers in support of innovation is substantial. The resulting social and
economic benefits far outweigh any modest risk to particular publishing interests....
The organizations signing the letter are the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL), American Library Association (ALA), Association of Academic Health Sciences Libraries (AAHSL), Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL), Association of Research Libraries (ARL), Greater Western Library Alliance (GWLA), Medical Library Association (MLA), and the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC).
Posted by
Peter Suber at 7/12/2006 08:41:00 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.
