Lord Martin Rees, President of the Royal Society, has publicly released his December 7 response to the open letter written by nearly 50 Fellows of the Royal Society in support of open access. Excerpt:
We certainly do not, as your letter implies, take a 'negative stance' to open access. We are simply concerned that open access is achieved without the risk of unintended damage to peer-review, quality control and long term accessibility of the scientific literature. The Royal Society is committed to the widest possible dissemination of research outputs. The Society is itself a delayed open access publisher (already providing free access after 12 months) and provides immediate access to researchers in developing countries and also to scientific papers that are of major public interest....However, the Society is not in favour of policies that might imperil scholarly communication by undermining the established subscription model of publishing before the alternatives (such as author-pays journals) have been fully explored and shown to be viable in the long run.
(PS: There's more but the online file is an image and I don't have time to rekey the rest. As with the earlier statement, most of the RS doubts focus on the viability of OA journals even though the RCUK proposal mandates deposit in OA archives, not submission to OA journals. I can't count the number of times this misunderstanding has been corrected, not only when the RS makes it but also when made by Lord Sainsbury and the UK government. Moreover, the RS call for more evidence overlooks the extensive inquiry on which the RCUK proposal is based, an inquiry in which the RS participated. Finally, the best way to gather evidence on the impact of OA archiving on journals is to adopt the RCUK policy, monitor the results, and keep the policy open to review and amendment. To demand proof of harmlessness as a precondition of the policy looks like a delaying tactic, especially when the RS doesn't acknowledge the existing evidence of harmlessness from physics, where OA archiving approaches 100%. If we all want the widest possible dissemination of research outputs, then let's get on with it.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/09/2005 10:37:00 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.
