The people who gathered here last week for the Association of American Publishers’ Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division's annual conference did not waste a lot of time worrying whether print is going the way of the dodo. As Matthew Nauman, director of publisher relations at Blackwell’s, put it, “A book sale is a book sale, and we don’t care what the format is.” ...
The conference did devote one session to copyright and public-access policies, like the one in place at the National Institutes of Health requiring that agency-supported research be made publicly available within 12 months of publication. That’s a red flag to many publishers. Last week, Rep. John Conyers Jr., a Democrat of Michigan, reintroduced the Fair Copyright in Research Works Act, which would undo such policies. The Association of American Publishers supports that legislation, but some at the conference said that Congress had more pressing matters —the economy, for instance— on its mind and that not much was likely to happen with the bill soon....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 2/12/2009 03:35:00 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.
