Open Access News

Following the Open Access (OA) movement has been like watching two tennis players fighting for a point in a high stakes tournament. Last month I highlighted the Research Council of the United Kingdom’s (RCUK) proposal to require that research that they fund be made available through self-archiving....A curiously temporary open letter was published on August 5th at Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) web site....Sally Morris, chief executive of ALPSP, the letter signator declares that, “We are convinced that RCUK’s proposed policy will inevitably lead to the destruction of journals. A policy of mandated self-archiving of research articles in freely accessible repositories, when combined with the ready retrievability of those articles through search engines (such as Google Scholar) and interoperability (facilitated by standards such as OAI-PMH), will accelerate the move to a disastrous scenario.”...[O]n August 21, eight friends of OA, including Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, and Stevan Harnad, long-standing advocate of OA, joined six other computer science professors in an open letter to Professor Ian Diamond the Chair of the RCUK Executive Group to refute the claims made by ALPSP....Morris noted member concerns that if the mandate passes smaller circulation journals and the society journals will suffer, if not cease publishing altogether. "Institutional repositories of non-organised papers will draw away subscriptions because the articles are easier to find due to Google Scholar and because budgets are dropping," said Morris....The rebuttal letter observes that, “This hypothesis has already been tested and the actual evidence affords not the slightest hint of any “move to a disastrous scenario.” Further, “when asked, both of the large physics learned societies (the Institute of Physics Publishing in the UK and the American Physical Society) responded very explicitly that they cannot identify any loss of subscriptions to their journals as a result of this critical mass of self-archived and readily retrievable physics articles....Researchers who cannot access the journal version, however – because their institutions “lack the funds to purchase all the content their users want” -- should not be denied access to the basic research results, which have always been given away for free by their authors (to their publishers, as well as to all requesters of reprints).”

(PS: Robin would like to make clear that she knows that the ALPSP letter was subsequently made public again, though her article went to press before this was known.)