Last week, GPO [the U.S. Government Printing Office] had the opportunity to assure the library community that free public access is a GPO priority and it failed to do so. Instead, in response to two questions that directly address the vague commitments to public access in its strategic vision for the 21st century, GPO chose to avoid the questions entirely and assure the library community that it is designing a system that will not be "constrained" by policies -- such as access without fees....The fact that GPO is designing a system that will not be "constrained" by policy should worry anyone who values free public access to government information because it means that GPO's "Future Digital System is designed to accommodate charging for access. What will happen to free public access, one might ask, when GPO's "operational policies" change to become self-supporting through user fees? As bad as that is, it is even worse that GPO continues to avoid taking any opportunity to affirm that it will at least try to ensure that government information will be made available without constraints or conditions or fees. There are two simple things that GPO can do to guarantee no-fee, fully-functional access to digital government information. First, it should say that it wishes to do so. So far, it has failed to take even this small step. Second, it should guarantee that it will release, without fee, fully-functional digital information to the public and depository libraries. This would ensure that good, usable copies are in the public domain and not locked into a system that may change its access policies and fee structure at a moment's notice.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 9/02/2005 09:37:00 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.
