James Ashton has written a profile of Crispin Davis, the Reed Elsevieir CEO, for The Daily Mail (January 26, 2006). I can't find it online, but William Walsh blogged an excerpt on Issues in Scholarly Communication yesterday. An excerpt from his excerpt:
Aside from the plaudits, Reed has also made enemies. Some factions regularly rail at its sheer size in the academic world, even though it has only 20% of the market to supply lofty titles like Tetrahedron and Cell to university libraries. The threat of researchers posting their papers straight on the internet has receded and Reed still makes its fattest profits in science and medical.
Comment. "The threat of researchers posting their papers straight on the internet has receded." If this means that researchers are self-archiving less, then it's false. Researchers are self-archiving more. If it means that Reed Elsevier no longer feels threatened by self-archiving, then it's true but misleading. Elsevier has given blanket permission for self-archiving since mid-2004. To describe self-archiving as decreasing and to describe it as a threat to Elsevier are equally mistaken. I suspect that Davis made both mistakes and that Ashton simply followed along.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/27/2006 09:33:00 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.
