Senior EPA managers are touting the message that the $2 million budget reduction, and subsequent library closures, will promote increased “efficiencies,” with virtually all EPA reports being available in an electronic format. These “savings” are illusory. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Here are some sobering facts regarding our impending library closures:...The National Environmental Publications Information System, EPA’s repository of electronic documents, currently holds about 13,000 documents. But the Agency has a total of about 80,000 documents that should be retained; most of these are not yet available in any electronic format. Our management has not addressed the issue of how much it will cost to digitize these thousands of reports, where the money will come from, or how long it will take to complete the task....
Also see the PEER press release acompanying its letter:
In an extraordinary letter of protest, representatives for 10,000 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency scientists are asking Congress to stop the Bush administration from closing the agency’s network of technical research libraries. The EPA scientists, representing more than half of the total agency workforce, contend thousands of scientific studies are being put out of reach, hindering emergency preparedness, anti-pollution enforcement and long-term research, according to the letter released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER)....Approximately 50,000 original research documents will become completely unavailable because they are not available electronically and the agency has no budget for digitizing them....The public and academic researchers may lose any access to EPA library materials as services to the public are being axed and there are no plans to maintain “the inter-library loan process.” “Eliminating library access is an absolutely awful way to run an agency devoted to public and environmental health,” stated PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch.
Comment. OA to all EPA-funded research would solve much (but not all) of this problem. But we're not there yet and a false claim of progress toward OA should not be used as a pretext to close off other forms of access.
The EPA is one of the 11 agencies covered by the OA mandate in the pending FRPAA. If the Bush administration wants to use OA to EPA research as a reason to shut down the EPA libraries, then it could show its good faith by backing FRPAA, on which it has not yet taken a position.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 7/07/2006 09:11:00 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.
