Jeremy Warner, Outlook: Reed Elsevier, Independent, June 4, 2004. Excerpt: "As market leader with approximately 17 per cent of the global market, Mr [Crispin] Davies should be sitting pretty, yet he's under attack as never before from those who want to see scientific and medical research freely available to all over the internet. The Commons' Science and Technology Committee promises next month to produce a report on the issue....Yesterday, Reed appeared to make a small concession to the 'free to air' lobby. In future, all research that has been approved for publication in one of Reed's journals can be displayed free prior to publication in edited form on the researcher's or institution's website. Researchers can already display their work on their own websites after publication, so the move hardly represents a decisive break in the dam. Even so, it's a concession which plainly weakens the business model to some degree. First publication rights have been conceded. It is indicative of the pressure Reed is under from its contributors that it has felt obliged to go even this far." (PS: Warner then gives some off-base commentary on OA. For example, even if the Wellcome Trust is right that OA journals would cost much less to produce than Elsevier journals of comparable quality, "it's hard to see what the benefit to the scientific community might be." Given this, it's hard to trust his commentary on anything else.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/04/2004 09:38:00 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.
