Re the APS/AIP distinction:
These are truly separate organizations, with separate
administrations, purposes and memberships. Individuals belong to the
APS; organizations belong to the AIP. The AIP is primarily a
publishing house for scientific journals of its member societies. The
APS is a true professional society, operated by and for its members.
The APS, as most of you know, has been a leader in OA and in working
out ways to enable maximum distribution of scientific literature.
At one time, a group of us, actually a working committee,
published an article in Science proposing that authors of scientific
papers should retain copyright for their papers. Martin Blume, a
member of the committee, a co-author of the paper and then
Editor-in-Chief of the APS, dissented. His argument: If a publisher
changes the mode of publishing, e.g. from paper to online electronic,
that publisher would have to get permission of every copyright holder
to make their work available in the new medium. Martin argued that
the journal could give the author a license to distribute her or his
work as widely as they wished, so that the author would be in the
same position as if she or he held the copyright. He is right about
that; I don't know whether a comparable license could be given to the
journal by the author if the author kept the copyright. In any event,
the goals of the authors and of journals of the APS are clearly
identical. This is not so clear with some other professional
societies and some commercial publishers, as we are all aware.
However I myself believe that the wishes and attitudes of the
authors and other advocates of OA will drive the market in that
direction, so that authors will simply choose to publish in the
journals that get them the best and widest circulation.
Steve Berry
>Below are Peter Suber's excerpts from the AIP (American Institute of Physics)
>"Position On Open Access & Public Access".
>
>It is important not to confuse AIP with APS (American Physical
>Society). AIP is merely the publishing arm of APS, which is a Learned
>Society (and one of the most progressive on OA).
>
>Don't take the grumbling of AIP too seriously. The APS/AIP
>division-of-labor is optimal, because it allows us to separate the
>scientific/scholarly interests from the publishing interests (which are
>so thoroughly conflated in most other Learned Societies, notably the
>American Chemical Society!).
>
>Below, the AIP is basically saying that the interests of generating and
>protecting their current revenue streams and cost-recovery model trump
>the interests of research, researchers, their institutions, their funders,
>and the interests of the tax-paying public that funds their funders.
>
>In contrast, the international Open Access movement, five out of eight
>UK Research Councils, the Wellcome Trust, the US FRPAA, the provosts of
>most of the top US universities, the European Commission, a growing number
>of Australian and Canadian Research Councils, CERN, and a growing number
>of individual universities and research institutions think otherwise.
>
>(By the way, self-archiving mandates do not "favor of one business model over
>another": They are not about business models at all. They are about maximizing
>the access, usage and impact of publicly funded research.).
>
>AIP is the publishing tail, again trying to wag the research dog. Soon we will
>see an end of this sort of nonsense.
>
> Berners-Lee, T., De Roure, D., Harnad, S. and Shadbolt, N. (2005)
> Journal publishing and author self-archiving: Peaceful Co-Existence
> and Fruitful Collaboration.
> http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11160/
>
>Stevan Harnad
>
>----
>
> From Peter Suber's Open Access News
>http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2006_12_10_fosblogarchive.html#116568265051590811
>
>The American Institute of Physics (AIP) http://www.aip.org/ has issued a
>statement spelling out the AIP Position On Open Access & Public Access.
>See the Fall 2006 issue of Professional Scholarly Publishing Bulletin,
>p. 3. The statement is dated October 2006.
>http://www.pspcentral.org/bulletins/current_bulletin.pdf
>
> AIP's mission and policy is to achieve that widest dissemination of the
>research results and other information we publish.
>
> * Since the arrival of the Web, AIP believes it has achieved wider and
> * more affordable dissemination than ever before in history, with more
> * subscribers, more readers and more libraries and other
>institutions and
> * people using our journals than ever before. Some use them free or at
> * very low cost under various open access models.
> * AIP believes it has been extremely successful in using and
>investing in
> * technology and new online platforms towards that end.
> * AIP has instituted and experimented with many business models,
> * including free and open access.
>
> AIP believes that publishers should be free to experiment with various
>business models in the market place of ideas and economics.
>
> * AIP is fearful of and against government mandates that
>provides rules
> * in favor of one business model over another.
> * AIP is against funding agencies mandating free access to
>articles after
> * they have undergone costly peer review or editing by publishers.
>
> AIP is against the government posting or distributing free
>copies of articles
>that publishers have invested in producing.
>
> * AIP believes that funding agencies have every right to report their
> * results to the public, but that if they choose to use
> * publisher-produced, peer-reviewed material to do that, then the
> * publisher should receive appropriate compensation.
> * AIP is also fearful about what government agencies might do with
> * articles they receive under any deposit system. In
>particular, AIP is
> * fearful of mission creep with government agencies using
>the deposited
> * material beyond the goal of public access, for example in enhanced
> * publications that compete with the private sector.
>
>----
>
>Peter Suber: The same issue of the PSP Bulletin (pp. 4, 8) reprints the
>September 22 letter from 10 provosts to Senators Cornyn and Lieberman,
>opposing FRPAA. See my September 22 comments on the letter.
>
>Peter Suber Comment. No doubt peer review is added value. It may be
>added by unpaid editors and referees, but there are transaction costs
>and they are paid by publishers. But government OA mandates only apply
>to research funded by taxpayers. Since both publishers and taxpayers
>make a contribution to the value of peer-reviewed articles based
>on publicly-funded research, what's the best way to split this baby?
>The current method is a reasonable compromise: a period of exclusivity
>for the publisher followed by free online access for the public. More,
>even after the embargo period ends, the existing policies and proposals
>only mandate access only to the author's peer-reviewed manuscript, not to
>the published edition. Publishers who want to block OA mandates per se,
>rather than just negotiate the embargo period, are saying that they want
>no compromise, that the public should get nothing for its investment,
>and that publishers should control access to research conducted by others,
>written up by others, and funded by taxpayers.
>
>http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2006_12_10_fosblogarchive.html#116568265051590811
Received on Mon Dec 11 2006 - 03:23:01 GMT