The Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) has once again been undermining repositories, both institutional and subject repositories, this time in its response to the British Library's Content Strategy. As an organisation that represents publishers it is perfectly reasonable for ALPSP to seek to defend their interests, but its approach to repositories will be counter-productive for these interests. On IRs, the ALPSP approach is misleading and self-contradictory. It says, "to date, publishers’ policies with regard to author self-archiving have been remarkably relaxed." This is not a one-way street. These policies have benefitted both publishers and repositories. ’Romeo green’ policies would not have been voluntarily adopted by publishers otherwise. ALPSP then repeats its familiar canard, that "when self-archiving reaches critical mass for any given journal, a serious decline in subscriptions may shortly follow", but later says "The Library will have a position of some responsibility in directing researchers to the ‘Gold Standard’ version of the publications they need, rather than potentially variant versions which lack the full linking and other functionality in which the publisher has invested." They can't have it both ways. If the published version has sufficient value-added to differentiate it from the author-produced version, they will have nothing to worry about from self-archiving....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 7/27/2006 01:41:00 PM.
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.
