Graham Taylor, Don't tell us where to publish, The Guardian, July 1, 2005. Excerpt: 'The RCUK policy assumes that someone else is handling publication [and peer review] in a sustainable way so that outputs can be lodged with repositories. But deposit on publication can only cannibalise the very system that makes mandating deposit viable in the first place. And then there are the costs. Is the current system failing? If access is a problem, where is the evidence?...Publishers will support their authors in making their material available through repositories, provided they are not set up to undermine peer-reviewed journals. We say to RCUK, by all means encourage experiments, but don't mandate. Don't force transition to an unproven solution. Whatever you do, make the true costs transparent. The paper backing up the policy makes little or no acknowledgement of what the learned societies and publishers have achieved over the last 10 years. This is not to say that the current system is perfect - it's not, but it's getting better fast as societies and publishers innovate and experiment with the technology that enables access. Evolution is inevitable, but we should allow time for the evidence to make the case, rather than standing on principle - the very basis, in fact, of most of the research outputs that this debate is all about.' Taylor is the director of educational, academic and professional publishing at The Publishers Association.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 7/02/2005 12:11:00 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.
