Controversies about open access publishing and archiving confront issues of copyright and governmental competition with the private sector. Traditional publishers typically charge subscriber fees that fund some of the costs of publishing and distributing hard-copy and/or online journals. In contrast, most open access systems charge authors publication fees and give readers free online access to the full text of articles or bibliographic citations. Supporters of the open access “movement” object to the rising costs of journal subscriptions; [are sometimes reluctant] to do free reviews for journals rapidly escalating in price; and [hold] the belief that scientific collaboration, advancement, and utilization will be hastened by free access to information. Traditional subscriber-pays commercial publishers and some scholarly associations object to most open access publishing [PS: archiving?] because it may duplicate what publishers sell, weaken the publishing industry, and erode profits. Some critics seek to limit free government-run repositories to include only articles and citations from federally sponsored research; others oppose fees in the thousands of dollars charged to authors to pay the costs of publishing articles or view as unreliable foundation donations that sustain some open access activities....
Controversial issues include modifying NIH’s Public Access policy to require the government to link to the original journal’s website to read articles; limiting federal systems to scientific information developed using federal funds; monitoring the added costs of expanding PubMed Central; determining if other agencies will use governmental nonexclusive licensing to allow access to commercially published journal articles, regardless of copyright ownership; assessing the quality of science published in open access journals; and evaluating the economic impacts of open access publishing [PS: archiving?] on traditional publishing. This report will be updated as needed....
This report begins with an inventory of basic information: definitions and guides to histories of the growth of open access publishing and citation archives and descriptions of selected major open access activities. It moves on to summarize major points of difference between proponents and opponents of nongovernmental open access publishing and databases, and then highlights federal, including National Institutes of Health (NIH), open access activities and contentious issues surrounding these developments. The report also briefly describes open access developments in the United Kingdom (where a number of governmental and nongovernmental initiatives have occurred) and in the international arena. Finally, controversial issues which could receive attention in the 109th Congress are summarized.
Comment. This report makes no policy recommendations, and only tries to summarize the questions and controversies. I'll say more when I've read more, but it doesn't start well by appearing to confuse OA journals with OA repositories; by asserting that "most open access systems charge authors publication fees" when in fact most do not; and on the first page by introducing the concept of OA by putting an essay by Martin Frank et al. on a par with the Budapest Open Access Initiative.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/11/2006 10:36:00 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.
