Summary: The Royal Society is a green publisher, giving its authors the green light to provide immediate Open Access to their articles by self-archiving them in their own institutional repositories in order to maximise their usage and impact. The Royal Society is now also an optional gold publisher, offering its authors the "Open Choice" of providing Open Access on their behalf, for a fee. But all of this is outweighed by the fact that this most venerable of Learned Societies, contrary to the wishes of at least 64 of its (unconsulted) members, has put its substantial prestige and gravitas behind a vehement -- and so far successful -- lobby against the Research Councils UK proposal to mandate author self-archiving by its fundees, as recommended by the UK parliamentary Select Committee on Science and Technology as well as the U.S. Federal Research Public Access Act, and the European Commission. In this respect, the Royal Society is deporting itself exactly like the crassest of commercial publishers, and is putting a sad blemish on its proud record in the history of Learned Inquiry and the dissemination of its fruits.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/23/2006 07:36:00 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.
