It doesn't take much surfing to identify that many of these signatories are not exactly neutral players, e.g the first two looked up were:
Mary J.C. Hendrix - a former president of FASEB
Barbara Horwitz - a former president of the American Physiological Society
A librarian colleague writes:
Ten signatories is all the publishers could come up with? I confess I'm happily surprised.
The University Librarian stopped by my desk a couple of weeks back to let me know that our VP for Research had been approached to sign this, but had asked him first. I wonder how many other institutions played out a similar scenario....
The education process that FRPAA has enabled is probably vastly more important than FRPAA itself, and without that education process, we don't *get* mandates anywhere, ever.
[This is] my first incredibly disappointing moment at U. C. Davis. My brother sent me this link about a letter to Congress from some provosts and deans trying to go backwards on the issue of Open Access to scientific publications....And one of the signatories is the Vice Provost for academic affairs at Davis, Barbara Horwitz. Their letter contains so many falsehoods I do not even know where to begin....
They also claim:
The free posting of unedited author manuscripts by government agencies threatens the integrity of the scientific record, potentially undermines the publisher peer review process, and is not a smart use of funds that could be better used for research.
How on earth does posting of unedited manuscripts threaten the integrity of the scientific record. That is like saying scientists should not give talks on anything until they have published it, and then they should only quote from their published papers. Or, maybe scientists should not even discuss their work at all in public and should just present it through papers published in journals. I am astonished that a Officer of my University would make such a completely outlandish statement.
Perhaps most amazingly, this collection of supposedly academic folks says:
As a member of the Senate Budget Committee, you are certainly sensitive to the various forces that shape and reshape the Federal budget from year to year. Recently, for example, we learned that the Biomolecular Interaction Network Database--the world's largest free repository for proteomic data--lost its funding and curtailed its curation efforts.
This is so absurd I do not even know where to begin. BIND is in the true tradition of Open Access - a database of proteomic information for the world to share. And these provosts and deans are trying to use its loss of funding as an argument for LESS OPEN ACCESS. How completely nonsensical is that. But even more incomprehensible, BIND is a CANADIAN database effort, supported in a large part by Genome Canada funding. So how this relates to the funding by the US Congress is beyond me.
This collection of provosts and deans clearly do not care about accuracy or the truth. They are clearly trying to protect money that they get from publishing. And they are pretending that this is for "all the scientists". Could they not just be honest and say "listen, we would like to continue to bring in money for publishing. And Open Access might cost us some of that money". Instead, they demean the whole debate by inventing stories....
[M]any of the signatories have active leadership roles in publishing non Open Access journals. Robert R. Rich is the Editor in Chief of J. Immunology, which does not support Open Access. Kenneth L. Barker is the President of SEBM, a publisher of non open access scientific publications. Barbara A. Horwitz, was the president of APS which sponsored this press release and publishes many non Open Access journals. I am sure many of the others have some type of similar roles. It would have been nice for them to mention that in this press release....
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.
