In the AAU CFR Weekly Wrap-Up
"The House Appropriations Committee
Enters Scholarly Publishing Fray"
http://aau.edu/publications/WR7.30.04.pdf
concerning the House Committee recommendation to mandate the
self-archiving of NIH-funded research articles within 6 months of
publication:
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3851.html
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3854.html
the Association of American Universities writes the following:
"AAU Position on Labor/ HHS/ Ed Report Language
"AAU has not taken a position on the substance of the proposal
contained in the report language, but the association believes that
a congressional prescription for scholarly publishing is unwise
and unwarranted. However the debate over public access is decided,
the quality and reliability of scholarly publishing should remain the
first priority. A congressional mandate requiring a specific business
model for the scholarly publishing enterprise prejudges what should be
an internal, transparent deliberation by the academic and scientific
communities. That process should examine the full range of options
for controlling costs and increasing access to scholarly publishing
while preserving its quality and reliability. Publishers are exploring
different options, and outside groups or the government -- no matter
how well intended -- should not prematurely pick winners and losers."
The AAU does not appear to have understood the substance of the
House Appropriations Committee proposal. It is not a congressional
prescription for scholarly publishing, nor a congressional mandate
requiring a specific business model. It is merely one (additional)
condition on receiving NIH research funding:
It is already mandated that funded research findings must be published
in a peer-reviewed journal, not just put in a desk-drawer ("publish or
perish"). The House Committee's recommended new funding-agency condition
is simply that user-access to those published journal articles must be
maximised by also self-archiving them in Open Access Archives. (The UK
Parliamentary Science and Technology Committee has just made essentially
the same recommendation.)
This misinterpretation by AAU is yet another symptom of the widespread
conflation of (1) the library serials crisis and journal affordability
problem with (2) the research access/impact problem. They are not the
same problem, and the solution to the one is not a solution to the other.
http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/accessdebate/21.html
Open Access (OA) does not equal OA Publishing, and OA provision strategies
need not be publishing reform strategies. In particular, the "green"
road to OA -- the author-institution self-archiving of their own (non-OA
journal) article output in OA Archives -- which is what Congress is
proposing to mandate, is not a publishing reform strategy. It is an
access maximization strategy (just as the mandate to publish itself is).
When will we stop confusing the green road of OA self-archiving with
the "golden road" of OA publishing?
See:
"The Green and Gold Roads to Open Access"
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3147.html
and
"Re: Mandating OA around the corner?"
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3890.html
Stevan Harnad
UNIVERSITIES: If you have adopted or plan to adopt an institutional
policy of providing Open Access to your own research article output,
please describe your policy at:
http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php
UNIFIED DUAL OPEN-ACCESS-PROVISION POLICY:
BOAI-2 ("gold"): Publish your article in a suitable open-access
journal whenever one exists.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#journals
BOAI-1 ("green"): Otherwise, publish your article in a suitable
toll-access journal and also self-archive it.
http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/
http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml
AMERICAN SCIENTIST OPEN ACCESS FORUM:
A complete Hypermail archive of the ongoing discussion of providing
open access to the peer-reviewed research literature online (1998-2004)
is available at:
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html
To join the Forum:
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html
Post discussion to:
american-scientist-open-access-forum_at_amsci.org
Received on Tue Aug 03 2004 - 14:19:12 BST