ALPSP has made public its October 10 comments on the NIH open-access plan. Excerpt: "Given the above initiatives, it is not clear that the scholarly community, nationally or internationally, is being deprived of access to any research literature – interlibrary loan is intended to fill any remaining gaps. If the requirement is to make the research accessible to the general public, we are not convinced either of the demand or of the benefit....While it is true that most publishers readily accede to their authors' requirement to post their articles online (although surprisingly few authors actually do so), they are concerned about the potential effect should this right ever be exercised by a significant majority of authors. We do not know what the 'tipping point' would be, but there must come a point at which librarians would consider it unnecessary to subscribe to a journal if most of its content were both freely available and readily retrievable." (Thanks to Nimrod Megiddo.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/21/2004 03:46:00 PM.
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.
