Open Access News

The best sources for news and perspectives on open access continue to be Peter Suber’s Open Access News weblog, (and the monthly newsletter from Suber that’s publicized on the blog); Charles W. Bailey, Jr.’s Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog; and Charles’ other blog, DigitalKoans. Those aren’t the only sources. In her new job, Dorothea Salo’s been offering some fascinating posts at Caveat Lector, about the realities of running a DSpace installation. There are others....

As Peter Suber notes in SPARC open access newsletter 90 (October 2, 2005), [the Wellcome Trust open-access policy] “does not require publisher consent and therefore does not accommodate publisher resistance” --which should also be true of NIH and RCUK policies....

I’m alarmed --alarmed that a society of chemists [the ACS] is headed by someone [Madeleine Jacobs] capable of making such exaggerated claims. Jacobs goes on to note that NIH’s $30 billion budget dwarfs the ACS budget and says NIH “should use its money to support research grants to advance its mission.” (I would suggest that using one-one hundredth of one percent of that money to assure access to research results might be considered an effective way to advance NIH’s mission, but I’m not ACS.)...

[On the early data on the compliance rate for the NIH public-access policy:] Those are appallingly low figures, suggesting that the voluntary process may not be working....

[On the ALPSP response to the draft RCUK policy:] The response from ALPSP is so predictable that it’s hardly worth recounting....Disastrous scenario. Destroyed viability. Threat to peer review. And the indirect assertion that it is the responsibility of “cash-strapped libraries” to subsidize the non-publishing activities of professional societies. One wonders what ALPSP believes “cash-strapped libraries” will do if ALPSP and its allies succeed in making sure that there are no alternatives to current journal prices and practices. Stop buying monographs altogether? Lay off staff? Or, ahem, cancel subscriptions even if that means less access?....

[On the ALPSP concession that publishers don't conduct peer review but only organize it:] When submissions and refereeing are handled electronically, that cost [of organization] should amount to a modest spreadsheet or database (say, MySQL or Access) and a tiny amount of someone’s time to track papers and results: The kind of thing that a good administrative assistant in an academic department could handle in a few hours a week for a midrange journal handling 100-200 submissions a year.