[Peter Suber has a posting in Open Access News in which he described SPARC's
Rick Johnson's very appropriate corrective to the misinterpretations of the
House Appropriations Committee's recommended mandate. The misinterperetations
were very much like the misinterpration by the AAU and by the press. Here is
Peter's OAN Posting.]
More on the NIH OA plan
Peter Suber (Posted in OA News on Tuesday, August 03, 2004)
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_08_01_fosblogarchive.html#a109158843132781812
Publishers Visit NIH To Protest Free Access Initiative, Library
Journal, August 4, 2004.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA441041?display=NewsNews&industry=News&industryid=1986&verticalid=151
A short, unsigned news story on the NIH OA plan from the House
Appropriations Committee. Excerpt: "While supporters of open access
hailed a proposal by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to make
all taxpayer-funded NIH research freely available within six months,
more than 100 publishers yesterday visited the NIH offices to voice
their strong opposition. Among their complaints: the NIH tucked
the measure into an appropriations bill, which denied publishers,
including society publishers, the opportunity to be heard on the
issue. 'This measure caught publishers completely off-guard,' said
Barbara Meredith, VP of Professional and Scholarly Publishing at the
Association of American Publishers (AAP). 'This essentially mandates
open access without any evidentiary hearings or studies.' The meeting
was hosted by NIH Chairman Elias Zerhouni, and was the first in what
is expected to be a number of hearings on the proposal, including,
Meredith adds, a possible colloquy sponsored by the AAP.
"In response to publisher outcry, Rick Johnson, director of SPARC,
in a letter sent to Zerhouni yesterday, suggested that NIH had made
the right choice and that publishers appeared to 'misunderstand
the proposal, which proposes open archiving, not open-access
publication.' Open archiving, Johnson said, 'is not a threat to
journals.' "
Pertinent Prior AmSci Topic Thread:
"The UK report, press coverage, and the Green and Gold Roads to
Open Access"
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3871.html
Received on Wed Aug 04 2004 - 17:35:51 BST