LibWorm Query: +(aap "association of american publishers") +"open access"

Association of american publishers says taxpayers have not paid for journal articles

Tue, 03 Aug 2010 14:39:45 +0100

More reporting on the hearing this week on Public Access to Federally-Funded Research: In his testimony to the House Committee On Oversight and Government Reform, Alan Adler of the Association of American Publishers, said: Publishers strongly believe that American taxpayers are entitled to the research they've paid for.... But taxpayers have not paid for the private sector, peer-reviewed journal articles reporting on that research. ...Peer-reviewed articles published in scholarly journals are not research, federally-funded or otherwise. They describe and explain the process, findings and significance of research. They require substantial amounts of the publisher's resources to ensure that their content is accurate, new, and important. Or, as Barbara Fister comments at Inside Higher Education, Sure, taxpayers are entitled to federally funded research, but "peer-reviewed articles published in scholarly articles are not research." No, they are the intellectual property of publishers, because they're the ones who spend all kinds of money to make sure the science in them is accurate. I'm not kidding. He actually said that. It's publishers who make sure the research is "accurate, new, and important." That peer review you do for free? They have to spend millions to make sure you do it right. So we have no problem, and taxpayers have to right to this stuff because it's not research. (Source: Free Government Information (FGI) blogs)

Now available: prepared testimony (full text) from “public access to federally funded research” hearing

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 16:11:42 +0100

From the Subcommittee Web Site: Background On Thursday, July 29, 2010, the Information Policy, Census, and National Archives Subcommittee [part of the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform] [held] a hearing entitled, “Public Access to Federally-Funded Research.” The hearing will review the current state of public access to federally-funded research in science, technology and medicine. The hearing will provide an opportunity to assess the issues surrounding public access policies, including the impact of increasing public access on scientists, physicians, and researchers. Prepared Testimony and Additional Documents All materials are PDF files. Opening Statement of Subcommittee Chairman Wm. Lacy Clay Prepared Testimony Mr. Allan Adler Vice President, Government Affairs Association of American Publishers Prepared Testimony Dr. Steven Breckler Executive Director for Science American Psychological Association Prepared Testimony Professor Ralph Oman Pravel Professorial Lecturer in Intellectual Property Law Fellow Creative and Innovative Economy Center The George Washington University Law School Prepared Testimony Dr. Richard Roberts Chief Scientific Officer New England Biolabs Prepared Testimony Ms. Sharon Terry President/CEO Genetic Alliance Prepared Testimony Mr. Elliott Maxwell Project Director, Digital Connections Council Committee for Economic Development Prepared Testimony Dr. Sophia Colamarino Vice President, Research Autism Speaks Prepared Testimony Dr. David Shulenburger Vice President, Academic Affairs Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities Prepared Testimony Ms. Catherine Nancarrow Managing Editor Public Library of Science Community Journals Additional Document 1 Submitted by Ms. Nancarrow “Creative Reuse of an OA Article Demonstrates the Power of Semantic Enhancement” Additional Document 2 Submitted by Ms. ...

Canadian authors launch petititon against google book settlement

Wed, 06 Jan 2010 23:09:11 +0100

A group of Canadian authors has launched an online petition to protest the proposed settlement intended to put an end to a class action copyright lawsuit by U.S.-based author and publisher groups over Google’s plans to make and sell digital copies of millions of books. In November 2009, the settlement was amended so that it would now apply only to books registered with the U.S. Copyright office or published in the U.K., Australia, or Canada. The Book Rights Registry board, the entity that will be responsible for paying authors and publishers from revenues earned by the digitization project, would also be required to search for copyright holders who have not yet come forward and to hold revenue on their behalf. Much of the controversy about the original deal focused on what many critics see as Google’s monopoly on so-called “orphan works” — out-of-print books that are still protected by copyright but whose writers’ whereabouts are unknown. The Canadian authors supporting the petition believe the amendments do go far enough and that the basic idea behind the settlement is flawed: “New Zealand, Ireland, South Africa and India – all countries with English-language presses similar to Canada’s — have been exempted from the settlement because they protested vigorously against it.. We wish to protest just as loudly. The Governments of France and Germany protested that illegal digitization of books amounted to theft of a cultural heritage. We agree, and believe that Canada’s heritage of Cultural nationalism should be applied to the Google settlement. All of continental Europe is now exempt, and so should Canada be.” “We believe that Canadian Copyrights should be subject to Canadian courts, as well as to the Berne Convention. ...

Revised google books settlement due nov. 9

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 04:00:00 +0100

Motoko Rich, Judge Sets Nov. 9 Deadline For Revised Google Book Settlement, New York Times: Media Decoder blog, October 7, 2009. The federal judge who is responsible for reviewing the Google book settlement that would create a vast digital library has set Nov. 9 as the date by which Google and its partners must submit a revised settlement for the court’s preliminary approval. The original agreement, which was reached last October between Google and representatives of the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers, was derailed by numerous objections from authors, academics, librarians, public interest groups and would-be rivals, as well as the Justice Department, which recommended in a filing last month that the court reject the settlement of the class-action suit as it currently stands. ... [Michael J. Boni, a lawyer representing the Authors Guild] said the parties “have worked on a daily basis assiduously” to modify the settlement and hoped to submit an amended document to the court in early November, with a target date of late December or early January for a final hearing on the settlement. Mr. Boni also appealed to the judge to allow Google and its partners to offer a truncated notice period to give all parties affected by the settlement time to review the amendments. He also said Google and its partners had agreed to extend a deadline for authors to claim books already scanned by Google from Jan. 5 to June 5, 2010. ... Bill Cavanaugh, a deputy assistant attorney general in the antitrust division of the Justice Department, said the government had already had discussions with the parties to the settlement about modifications but had not yet seen a preliminary amended agreement. ... Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild, said in an interview that the changes would be minor. “We would not be able to do it by Nov. 9” if they were more substantial, he said. “The core agreement is going to stay the same. ...

Google book search settlement deadline

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 04:00:00 +0100

Tomorrow marks the deadline for comments on the proposed settlement between Google and U.S. publisher and author organizations over the search giant's project to digitize millions of books.The settlement is intended to end class action lawsuits that charged Google with copyright infringement for unauthorized mass scanning.Interested parties have been invited to make comments to a New York judge by tomorrow. In early October, that judge will consider whether or not to approve the settlement.In recent days, the number of comments and analyses about the deal has increased dramatically. Here are a few:Google's plan for world's biggest online library: philanthropy or act of piracy? (The Guardian, August 30, 2009): "Several opponents have recently emerged (...) First, they have questioned whether the primary responsibility for digitally archiving the world's books should be allowed to fall to a commercial company (...) The second, related criticism is that Google's scanning of books is actually illegal. This allegation has led to Google becoming mired in a legal battle whose scope and complexity makes the Jarndyce and Jarndyce case in Bleak House look straightforward."Advocates: Google Books can bridge digital divide (CNET News, September 3, 2009): "A coalition of civil-rights and disability groups in favor of Google's book-scanning project held a press conference Thursday to marshal support for improving access to knowledge, the key benefit of Google's deal with authors and publishers to create a new kind of digital library. They fear that a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to gain digital access to knowledge previously stored in libraries at expensive universities or rich communities could be hampered by the opposition to the settlement from some authors and privacy advocates. ...

Lessons from the plagiarism beat

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 04:00:00 +0100

Erica Hendry, Students Reach Settlement in Turnitin Suit, Chronicle of Higher Education, August 3, 2009. Excerpt: A two-year battle over copyright infringement between four students and Turnitin, a commerical plagiarism-detection service, came to an apparent end last Friday in a settlement that prohibits either party from taking further legal action. The high-school students first sued iParadigms, Turnitin's parent company, in 2007 for copyright infringement, saying the company took their papers against their will and then made a profit from them. The students' high schools required them to use the service, which scans papers for plagiarism and then adds them to its database, which students argued could easily be hacked. But the students and their lawyers were handed two decisions against them -- first from the U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va., in March 2008 and again this April from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. The Chronicle reported in March 2008 that the district-court judge said Turnitin's actions fell under fair use, ruling that the company “makes no use of any work’s particular expressive or creative content beyond the limited use of comparison with other works." He also said the new use “provides a substantial public benefit.” ... Comment. Under this standard for fair use, wouldn't Google have prevailed against the Authors Guild and Association of American Publishers, making the whole complicated and controversial Google book settlement unnecessary? (Source: Open Access News)

U.s. publishers endorse international joint statement on open access debate

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 18:49:02 +0100

From the Announcement: The Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers (AAP/PSP) today expressed its support and endorsement of a joint statement on the open access debate issued by two prestigious international organizations representing publishers and librarians. Designed to bring more light and less heat to the often contentious debate surrounding open access, the statement, entitled “Enhancing the Debate on Open Access,” was issued on May 20 by the International Publishers Association (IPA) and the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA). They were joined in releasing the statement by the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers. Source: Professional/Scholarly Publishing (PSP) Division of the Association of American Publishers, Inc.(AAP) (Source: ResourceShelf)

Aap/psp endorses ipa/ifla “enhancing the debate on open access” statement

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 04:00:00 +0100

The Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers has endorsed the IPA/IFLA "Enhancing the Debate on Open Access" statement. Here's an excerpt from the press release: The Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers (AAP/PSP) today expressed its support and endorsement of a joint statement on the open access debate issued by two prestigious international organizations representing publishers and librarians. Designed to bring more light and less heat to the often contentious debate surrounding open access, the statement, entitled "Enhancing the Debate on Open Access," was issued on May 20 by the International Publishers Association (IPA) and the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA). They were joined in releasing the statement by the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers. Although the debate over open access presents a unique and important opportunity for the international publishing and library communities to explore the use of technology and new business models to meet the challenges of growing scholarly publishing output, the debate has too often been hobbled "by unnecessary polarisations and sweeping generalized statements." The IPA/IFLA statement attempts to lay out common ground for both communities so that future debate is conducted "in an open-minded way, encouraging experimentation and arguments based on empirical facts. . . ...

Aap/psp endorses ipa/ifla “enhancing the debate on open access” statement

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 03:05:32 +0100

Aap/psp endorses ipa/ifla “enhancing the debate on open access” statement

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 03:05:26 +0100

Update on the oa discussion at the u of california

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 04:00:00 +0100

Mengfei Chen, Journals: The Cost of Free Access, New University, April 20, 2009. This excerpt picks up after Chen discusses the MIT OA policy and rising journal prices: ...[Rising journal prices have], according to Lorelei Tanji, [the University of California at Irvine's] Assistant University Librarian for Collections, made it increasingly difficult for libraries to afford the journals that researchers and student use. Libraries around the United States, including the UCs, have been forced to cut the less-used titles in their collection. Tanji pointed out that part of the problem is that authors are often unknowledgeable about their rights. “[Often] people are so focused on publishing that they don’t always read what they are signing. Sometimes authors are also afraid to change the [release] form because they are worried of not being published. So they may just sign away their rights,” Tanji said. In the past, this meant that some researchers would sign an agreement only to find out later that they couldn’t freely use the material in their classrooms or post it onto online repositories. However, Tanji believes that things have changed in publishing. Many publishers are now willing to amend their agreements to allow authors much more control over their work. John Tagler is the former vice president of Elsevier....After 30 years at Elsevier, Tagler left the publisher to serve as vice president and executive director of the Association of American Publishers Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division. He agreed with Tanji’s assessment that publishers are now more willing to accommodate authors. However, Tagler refused to answer specific questions about Elsevier, whose profits rose by about 30 percent last year. Instead, he insisted that it is impossible to make general statements about journal publishers because not all publishers are the same.... ...

The nih oa mandate after one year

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 04:00:00 +0100

Meredith Wadman, Open-access policy flourishes at NIH, Nature, April 7, 2009. Excerpt: One year on, advocates of free public access to scientific literature are calling a law that requires researchers at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) to make their manuscripts publicly available at the PubMed Central repository a success. At the same time, the measure continues to be challenged by a senior congressman and some publishers. Since the legal requirement that NIH-funded researchers make their manuscripts publicly available after acceptance for journal publication came into effect last April, the number of articles being approved by their authors for processing by the repository has more than tripled. In March 2009, 6,425 such original articles were approved by their authors for processing; a year earlier, the number was 1,852 (see graph)....Author compliance "has been dramatically altered" by converting an "anaemic" voluntary policy into law, says former NIH director Harold Varmus, now president of the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York and a keen supporter of open-access initiatives. But the policy still has opponents. "This so-called 'open access' policy was not subject to open hearings, open debate or open amendment in Congress," John Conyers (Democrat, Michigan), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, wrote on The Huffington Post website last month (he declined to be interviewed for this article). In February, Conyers re-introduced a bill from the last congressional session that would amend US copyright law to forbid the NIH making funding conditional on manuscripts being publicly accessible. However, congressional observers say that the bill has little chance of going anywhere this year. Open-access policies have caught on around the world in recent years. ...

More on the conyers bill: publisher breaks with publishing lobby

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 04:00:00 +0100

The Boston Globe has published two letters to the editor in response to Richard Roberts' March 23 op-ed piece defending the NIH policy and denouncing the Conyers bill (blogged here the same day). From Patricia Schroeder, President of the Association of American Publishers, March 30, 2009: Richard J. Roberts declared that scientific publishers must "stop trying to rob the public" of free access to taxpayer-funded scientific research ("Protect our access to medical research," op-ed, March 23). But research manuscripts are the foundation of the products developed by scientific publishers, and those products are neither free nor government-funded. Imposing revenue-free business models on scientific publishing is a bad idea for science and society. New England Biolabs, where Dr. Roberts works, derives some products from government-funded research - and succeeds by not giving its products away. Most publishers, including small nonprofits run by scientific societies, firmly oppose the deceivingly reasonable-sounding new mandate that National Institutes of Health-funded articles be posted openly on the Web after one year. That practice may be harmless for a weekly journal but can be devastating for a monthly or quarterly. Is public access a problem? Not with Google indexing copies of articles that authors often post on personal or institutional websites. Is patients' access to medical literature a concern? Most publishers will provide free or modestly priced copies of individual studies. And scientific publishers translate the highest- impact articles into understandable lay-language summaries. ...

A (publishing) house divided: scholarly publishers in support and opposition to public access to research

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 13:07:16 +0100

I wasn’t surprised to learn that the American Association of Publishers had sent a letter [PDF ] to then President-elect Obama in December opposing the National Institutes of Health Public Access Policy, which requires any NIH-funded researchers to deposit a copy of what they have discovered and published in a publicly accessible archive. The AAP publishers association holds that the NIH Policy infringes on their business rights, insofar as it grants the public a right to this publicly funded work, and in support of their objections, Rep. John Conyers, Democrat of Michigan, has reintroduced into Congress the questionably entitled Fair Copyright in Research Works Act, HR 801 which would make it illegal for the federal government to institute such measures as the NIH Public Access Policy. There has been a minor blog-storm objecting to this un-Obama like move. To the welcomed outcry against this regressive legislative proposal, I have but a couple of points to add. First, one has to appreciate that this National Institutes of Health Public Access Policy already includes considerable concessions to publishers who would use this research to generate a profit margin or sustain a scholarly society. Not only does the NIH Policy ensure that “public access” only takes place 12 months after publication, but that what is made public is only the author’s final draft. That would seem sufficient to protect the value of journal subscriptions, while recognizing the rights of the public to at least second-class access. It is thus unfair for the AAP to claim that “the NIH mandate severely diminishes both the market and copyright protection for these copyrighted works to which not-for-profit and commercial publishers have made significant value-added contributions,” as the AAP letter advises the president. ...

More on the boston u. policy and the supposed threat to peer review

Thu, 05 Mar 2009 05:00:00 +0100

Jon Marcus, Publishers struggle to cope with open-access tide, Times Higher Education, March 5, 2009. Boston University has become the first major US higher education institution to post its academics' research online, bypassing the traditional route of publishing papers in peer-reviewed journals, which it said restricts public access. ... But John Tagler, director of the professional and scholarly publishing division of the Association of American Publishers, said this was an overstatement. Most scholarly publishers give extensive rights to authors to reuse the intellectual content they provide. "It's not as restrictive as they're positioning it here." Mr. Tagler said the validation process that research must go through to be published in journals is essential to maintain standards. "There's a real difference between posting (research) on your university website versus going through a peer review, which gives it certification among international experts." As more data go online, peer review will become more vital, he said. "How (else) will you separate the wheat from the chaff?" Comments. It's hard to find an interpretation of "Boston University has become the first major US higher education institution to post its academics' research online" that would make it an accurate statement. Dozens of IRs for U.S. institutions are listed on OpenDOAR or ROAR. Boston also isn't the first university to adopt a policy supportive of OA or encouraging its faculty to self-archive. If it had adopted a university-wide OA mandate, it would have been the first in the U.S., but it didn't. Moreover, no part of the Boston policy "bypass[es] the traditional route of publishing papers in peer-reviewed journals". In fact, the policy specifically recommends "publication in peer-reviewed Open Access journals". ...

How is unauthorized downloading affecting university presses?

Thu, 19 Feb 2009 05:00:00 +0100

Scott Jaschik, Pirates vs. University Presses, Inside Higher Ed, February 18, 2009. ... [T]hose involved with anti-piracy efforts say that university presses are now targets of a number of sites. In a particularly disturbing trend, some presses are reporting that pre-publication digital editions are ending up on these piracy Web sites, raising concerns about the need to better track who has access to such versions. Princeton University Press has emerged as something of an expert on the issue — a distinction the press wishes it didn’t have. Over the summer, an author the press declined to identify informed the publisher that his book was being made available for downloading in its entirety on one of these Web sites. For several months, Princeton had a staffer focused on identifying piracy sites with its books, and following up with “take down” notices that threaten legal action for keeping the books up. Some of the Web sites take the books down, but then others pop up. ... Daphne Ireland, director of intellectual property for the Princeton press, said that in the last year, it has succeeded in having several hundred books removed from Web sites where they were being offered free ... Some university presses — along with other publishers — are trying to join forces to deal with the problem. The Association of American Publishers has helped a group of publishers jointly support the monitoring of pirate Web sites to identify violations. ... N.B. Several comments on the article suggest OA as an alternative. (Source: Open Access News)

Publisher views of the conyers bill at the aap/psp meeting

Thu, 12 Feb 2009 05:00:00 +0100

Jennifer Howard, At Publishers' Conference, the Digital Future Is (Almost) Now, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 9, 2009 (accessible only to subscribers). Excerpt: 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.... (Source: Open Access News)

Copyright alliance and aap welcome re-introduction of conyers bill

Thu, 05 Feb 2009 05:00:00 +0100

Two publisher groups which supported the Conyers bill the last time around are supporting it again. No surprises here. From the Statement of Patrick Ross, Executive Director of the Copyright Alliance, February 4, 2009: The Copyright Alliance praises House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers for introducing HR-801, the Fair Copyright in Research Works Act.... Federal copyright law and years of precedent grant copyright owners control of the right of reproduction, distribution, and public performance and display. But in a troubling reversal of this incentivizing precedent, Congress – without consultation of members with expertise in copyright law – has given the federal government control over the reproduction and distribution of certain research works without regard to the rights of publishers. The mere fact that a scientist accepts as part of her funding a federal grant should not enable the federal government to commandeer the resulting peer-reviewed research paper and treat it as a public domain work. Grants are provided to pay for the research and resulting data, which is generally freely and immediately available. But taking the scientist’s copyrighted interpretation of the data is not fair to other funders, and it violates the rights of the publisher. A publisher improves the work through a rigorous peer review process and develops it for publication.... From the press release of the Association of American Publishers, February 4, 2009: The Association of American Publishers welcomed the re-introduction of legislation to safeguard the rights of authors and publishers of copyrighted, peer-reviewed scientific journal articles, and praised House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers Jr.... The Fair Copyright in Research Works Act, HR 801...would help keep the Federal Government from undermining copyright protection for journal articles where private-sector publishers have added such significant value. ...

Publishing lobby appeals to obama transition team to stop nih policy

Wed, 07 Jan 2009 05:00:00 +0100

Allan Adler for the Association of American Publishers and Martin Frank for the DC Principles Coalition have released their December 22 letter to the Obama transition team, asking it to oppose the NIH policy and support the Conyers bill. Excerpt: ...In seeking to work with the new Administration, we would like to make you aware of our continuing concerns regarding the Public Access Policy of the National Institutes of Health, which effectively allows the NIH to unfairly compete directly with private-sector journal publishers in the distribution of peer-reviewed scientific journal articles that are authored by NIH-funded researchers....The NIH mandate...severely diminishes both the market and copyright protection for these copyrighted works to which not-for-profit and commercial publishers have made significant value-added contributions, and makes the NIH a free, alternative source of access to these materials in competition with the journal publishers’ subscription or other distribution models.... In addition to the negative implications for domestic copyright policy, this incursion upon intellectual property rights in the United States will make it difficult for the Federal Government to continue its active promotion of effective copyright protection and enforcement policies with our international trading partners and will adversely impact a $7-8 billion industry that contributes significantly to U.S. exports, jobs and economic growth.... Just three months ago, in response to these concerns, Chairman Conyers introduced the bipartisan Fair Copyright in Research Works Act (H.R. 6845) and scheduled a House subcommittee hearing to begin to explore the copyright implications of the new mandatory NIH policy. ...

More on the google settlement

Thu, 01 Jan 2009 05:00:00 +0100

Chris Castle, Is Google's culture grab unstoppable? The Register, December 31, 2008. Excerpt: Google dealt itself a powerful piece of the future in the proposed settlement of the "Google Books" case his year. The plaintiffs, the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers, permitted Google pay itself to build a proprietary technology infrastructure for a "Book Rights Registry". This effectively creates a single purpose author's society, but one that grants licenses to one user - Google. While nominally "non exclusive", there's little incentive for competitors - a formidable position. Let's have a look at how Google is set to own the Digital Book.... The $125m buys Google - and only Google - permission not just to scan books for indexing purposes, but also to expand Book Search further. As the EFF noted, "if Google can strike a settlement with a large slice of the aggrieved copyright owners, then it solves the copyright problem for itself, while leaving it as a barrier to entry for [Google’s] competitors." The British Booksellers Association...agreed.... If a competitor tried building a competing book registry by negotiating licenses for in-copyright works, that competitor would have to bear the startup costs—and the cost of licensing. If the competitor is rewarded for respecting authors’ rights by obtaining favorable terms, that advantage can be taken away by Google. Why? Because one of Google’s goodies from its dominant position in the settlement negotiation is “most favored nations” price protection. The registry is contractually required to offer Google any better terms it would give to anyone using any data or resources that Google provides the registry, or that is of the type that Google provides.... ...

Lj editorializes against google settlement

Tue, 16 Dec 2008 05:00:00 +0100

Francine Fialkoff, Google Deal or Rip-Off? Librarians need to protect the public interest, Library Journal, December 15, 2008. An editorial. Excerpt: One public access terminal per public library building. Institutional database subscriptions for academic and public libraries that secure once freely available material in a contractual lockbox, which librarians already know too well from costly e-journal and e-reference database deals. No remote access for public libraries without approval from the publisher/author Book Rights Registry, set up to administer the program. And no copying or pasting from that institutional database, though you can print pages for a fee. Of course, you can always purchase the book, too. Those are just a few of the choice tidbits from the 200-page settlement in the Association of American Publishers (AAP) and Authors Guild three-year-old suit against Google, drawn from Jonathan Band's “Guide for the Perplexed: Libraries and the Google Library Project Settlement.” Band's report was commissioned by the American Library Association and the Association of Research Libraries.... [T]he suit was never about the public interest but about corporate interests, and librarians did not have much power at the bargaining table, no matter how hard those consulted pushed. While there are many provisions in the document that specify what libraries can and can't do and portend greater access, ultimately, it is the restrictions that scream out at us from the miasma of details. Even the libraries that were initial partners (or those that become partners) in the Google scan plan don't fare well. They get a single digital copy of each book from their collection—mind you, they've paid for these books already—and can print a replacement copy only if a new copy isn't available at a “fair price. ...

More on the debate over the google settlement

Tue, 16 Dec 2008 05:00:00 +0100

Andrea Foster, Google Settlement to Pay Lawyers Up Front, Authors Eventually: Opinions on Settlement Differ, But Negotiations Cloaked in Secrecy by Non-Disclosure Agreements, Doing the Write Thing, undated but apparently December 15, 2008. A detailed account. Excerpt: ...Publishers, scholars, and authors, along with Google, have hailed the agreement as a boon to book lovers and an ingenious solution to the thorny issue of how to fairly compensate authors and publishers in the digital age. Books and periodicals are quickly moving online, and the public, it seems, expects to read it all for free. But critics say the settlement is flawed. Some are troubled that those privy to the settlement negotiations are barred from disclosing any details. Many scholars are disappointed that Google failed to defend what they see as the legality of digitizing copyrighted books. Others worry that the agreement gives Google too much power. They fear that the company will monopolize commerce around digital books, or will hide certain books from its database if it fears their distribution would threaten the company's bottom line.... Boni, the Author's Guild lawyer, said the group made the right decision to settle the case rather than argue before a judge that Google was infringing on authors' copyrights. "We have a groundbreaking book-publishing deal the likes of which the world has never seen," he said. "We could never have gotten that had we brought this case to trial." The Association of American Publishers, which filed a separate suit against Google for scanning copyrighted works, also applauded the settlement. Jeffrey P. Cunard, the lead lawyer for the publishing group, said that if his clients brought the case to trial it might have taken many years and many appeals before the suit would have been resolved. And it was never clear whether the publishers would have prevailed, he added.... ...

Sage report: meeting the challenges: societies and scholarly communication

Fri, 05 Dec 2008 21:03:06 +0100

SAGE has released Meeting the Challenges: Societies and Scholarly Communication (Thanks to Adrian K. Ho's Digital & Scholarly: News about Research and Scholarship in the Digital Age.) Here's an excerpt: The survey was supported by the Association for Learned Professional and Scholarly Publishers; the Professional/Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers; the International Association for Science, Technical and Medical Publishers, and the Federation of Behavioral, Psychological and Cognitive Sciences, and made available to the 600+ members of these organizations. The online survey of 30 questions was available for response from 2 September, 2008 – 23 September, 2008. 118 responses were completed during this time—reflecting approximately 19% of the organizations contacted. Societies cited the major challenges facing them as international presence for their organization; membership retention and growth; provision of online services; resources (funding and income); and Open Access. International presence was the most highly-ranked attribute for societies (49%), with particular importance placed on sales representation on a global scale. (Source: DigitalKoans)

Sage report: meeting the challenges: societies and scholarly communication

Fri, 05 Dec 2008 05:00:00 +0100

More on the google-publisher settlement

Thu, 30 Oct 2008 04:00:00 +0100

Here are some comments on the settlement from the press and blogosphere. From Andrew Albanese at Library Journal: ...On a conference call this morning [10/28/08], the parties said that there remained a strong difference of opinion over the copyright principles at the core of the case. “We had a major disagreement with Google, and we still do,” said Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild. “We also don’t see eye-to-eye on with publishers on book contract law,” he added, before calling the settlement the “the biggest book deal” in U.S. publishing history. Taylor said two “guideposts” helped lead his organization through a thicket of issues in the suit. “Authors like their books to be read,” he noted, “and like they like a nice royalty check.” ... $45 million of [Google's $125 million] will be used to resolve claims for those whose books have been digitized—roughly $60 a book to authors.... [T]he “snippet”—the short glimpses of in-copyright book content initially offered by Google—will be replaced by a “preview” function, offering up to 20 percent of the book, including entire pages.... From Andrew Albanese in a second article for Library Journal: ...As with any class action suit, don’t expect the final results to come quickly. The settlement must still be approved by a federal judge—and as the recent Tasini settlement shows that may be no slam dunk. Further, as one attorney told LJ on background, executing the nuts and bolts of the deal—creating the registry, setting up the subscription plan, and especially disbursing Google’s payment to authors and publishers—will provide no shortage of challenges to all parties. “There will be objectors, there always are,” the attorney stated. “This is going to be incredibly complex.” The settlement could even see another lawsuit filed to seeking stop it.... ...

Google books news

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 04:00:00 +0100

Google, the Authors Guild, and the Association of American Publishers announced Oct. 28th that they had settled their longstanding legal battle over Google’s mass scanning of books. Under the terms of the deal, Google will pay $125-million to establish a Book Rights Registry, to compensate authors and publishers whose copyrighted books have already been scanned, and to cover legal costs. It isn't clear yet what this will mean to WU users. I expect we will be hearing a lot more on this story. Here are a few comments already: Google's blog post Google, Publishers, and Authors Settle Huge Book-Scanning Lawsuit (Chronicle of Higher Education) Peter Suber on Open Access news (Source: Biology Library News)

Google and publishers settle

Tue, 28 Oct 2008 04:00:00 +0100

Google and the book publishers who sued to stop the Google library project have reached a settlement. See the AAP's settlement page and press release, as well Google's settlement page, press release, and blog post. The two press releases use the same text. From the common press release (October 28, 2008): The Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers (AAP), and Google today announced a groundbreaking settlement agreement on behalf of a broad class of authors and publishers worldwide that would expand online access to millions of in-copyright books and other written materials in the U.S. from the collections of a number of major U.S. libraries participating in Google Book Search. The agreement, reached after two years of negotiations, would resolve a class-action lawsuit brought by book authors and the Authors Guild, as well as a separate lawsuit filed by five large publishers as representatives of the AAP’s membership. The class action is subject to approval by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.... The agreement acknowledges the rights and interests of copyright owners, provides an efficient means for them to control how their intellectual property is accessed online and enables them to receive compensation for online access to their works. If approved by the court, the agreement would provide: More Access to Out-of-Print Books -- Generating greater exposure for millions of in-copyright works, including hard-to-find out-of-print books, by enabling readers in the U.S. to search these works and preview them online; Additional Ways to Purchase Copyrighted Books -- Building off publishers’ and authors’ current efforts and further expanding the electronic market for copyrighted books in the U.S. ...

More on the springer-bmc deal

Sat, 11 Oct 2008 04:00:00 +0100

Andrea Gawrylewski, A match made in open access heaven? TheScientist, October 10, 2008. Excerpt: ...According to an Email sent to editors at BMC by the BMC publisher Matt Cockerill, BMC will be an autonomous operating unit within Springer, and everything remains business as usual.... "If BMC's presence within the organization means Springer moves closer to the BMC model and not BMC closer to the Springer Open Choice model -- then this will be a very good thing for open access," Rebecca Kennison, director of the Center for Digital Research and Scholarship at Columbia University, told The Scientist in an Email. "Time will tell." With BMC under its wing, Springer will offer authors three publishing choices, depending on the journal they choose in which to publish their [work]: the traditional subscription model, the Open Choice model, and the BMC automatic open access model. "All of the business models are going to grow in the future," Eric Merkel-Sobotta, spokesperson for Springer told The Scientist, adding that they aren't going to stop adding journals under the subscription model, or the BMC model. There's no publishing model that fits all, he added, and no publishing business model is for free. "We don't refer to them as business models for nothing -- they're not an ideology." "I think people are very interested in seeing how you put these two diff publishing models together," Patricia Schroeder, president and CEO of the Association of American Publishers (AAP), told The Scientist. The AAP has been a vocal opponent of the National Institutes of Health's mandate requiring federally-funded researchers to deposit a copy of their papers into PubMed Central. "It's exciting to see [the two publishing models] get out of silos," Schroeder added. "I'm anxious to see how it all evolves." (Source: Open Access News)

More comments on the conyers bill

Fri, 19 Sep 2008 04:00:00 +0100

Here's our third collection of comments on the Conyers bill from around the blogosphere. (Also see our first and second.) From Jonathan Blackhall at Encephalosponge: ...As a taxpayer and citizen, I cannot believe the idiocy of some of statements against open access in Congress.... From David Bollier at On the Commons: ...You would think business people could understand the simple economic proposition that taxpayers should be entitled to own and control what they pay for. But apparently not. Commercial journal publishers are now rallying to overturn the new NIH open access policy.... It’s depressing, but not entirely surprising, that two stalwart liberals are backing this betrayal of the public interest to serve a powerful corporate lobby. One is Pat Schroeder, the former congresswoman from Colorado, has headed the AAP for the past 11 years. Her former Democratic colleague on the House Judiciary Committee is John Conyers, who has since become the venerable chairman. Meanwhile, another liberal stalwart, Howard Berman – the California Congressman who enthusiastically advocates for the motion picture industry, record industry and other copyright bullies – chairs the Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property. At a hearing last week, Berman made the uninformed complaint that the “N” in NIH shouldn’t stand for Napster, implying that the NIH’s open-access policy was ripping off copyright holders. Excuse me, Mr. Chairman: copyrights belong to authors, not to publishers. And the funders of authors’ works — in this case, U.S. taxpayers — have a legitimate say in directing how that work should be published. Giving them away to commercial publishers exclusively and in perpetuity, does not advance public knowledge, which, after all, is the primary mission of copyright law.... ...

More comments on the conyers bill

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 04:00:00 +0100

Here are some more comments on the Conyers bill from around the blogosphere. (Also see our first collection of comments, three days ago.) From The Aust Gate: ...The only people who “benefit” from [the Conyers bill] in the short term are the publishing companies who appear to be heading down the MPAA/RIAA route of trying to make increasingly short term profits....[The bill] is clearly a knee jerk reaction to the way that knowledge and its ease of transfer takes place. Publishers should be looking at changing their business models to adapt rather than trying to hold on to something that is slowly dying. Especially if the research and publication costs are being borne by the public.... From Paul Courant at Au Courant: ...Think of [the Fair Copyright in Research Works Act] as the Clear Skies Act for copyright; an odious piece of corporate welfare wrapped in a friendly layer of doublespeak....It would make it illegal for U.S. government agencies to seek any rights at all in the research that they fund. This is anything but fair. Indeed, it is manifestly unfair to the taxpayers who ultimately pay for the research, and on whose behalf the research is conducted. Publishers have pushed for this bill because they fear that open access mandates will reduce their profits.... Instead of baldly admitting that what they seek is protection for their dying business model, publishers argue that the NIH Public Access policy violates their copyrights. The assertion is hogwash....[T]he fact that they have traditionally signed over all of their rights to publishers without compensation does not mean they should continue doing so.... Allan Adler, VP of the Association of American Publishers, had the gall to say during his testimony that “Government does not fund peer-reviewed journal articles —publishers do.” That’s just not true....The referees’ salaries are paid by universities and research institutes, not by publishers.... ...

More on the bill to overturn the nih policy

Sun, 14 Sep 2008 04:00:00 +0100

Here are some comments from around the blogosphere. From the Bioinformationista: ...Are you kidding me?! I know that it is a cumbersome process to have to deposit your work, but how can you really tell me that the publisher’s interest are more important than scientific process? *SOAPBOX WARNING* If you are AT ALL interested in NLP [natural language processing] or in the fact that you pay taxes so that this research can be conducted, then I would recommend contacting your representative to oppose this bill....And the publishers’ arguments on PEER REVIEW? Please. Ask any of the PLoS journals if the peer-review process has been destroyed. I’m appalled.... From Michael Eisen at It Is Not Junk : ...I googled [Ralph Oman, one of the witnesses at the September 11 hearing]. And here's the top hit. A list of campaign contributions he's made. These lists are fascinating. Oman is clearly no Democrat. He gave money to Bill Frist, Henry Hyde and even Katherine Harris when she ran for Congress!! So it's curious that he also gave $500 to John Conyers, head of the House Judiciary Committee who is holding this hearing. Hmm. I wonder why he was invited.... Are our representatives really this cheap? ... From T.K. Kenyon on Gather: ...[The NIH OA policy] is crucial for [researchers,] journalists and for citizen scientists who want to read the primary literature and judge results on their merit rather than relying on brief abstracts. Most researchers have little access outside of their narrow field....The free access of information, especially information based on research funded by taxpayer money, is essential to research and to society. I hope Congress does not stymie the NIH's gallant attempt to spread knowledge.... From Meredith Wadman at The Great Beyond (from Nature): There’s nothing like having old friends in high places. ...

More on the publishing lobby's rejection of compromise

Fri, 12 Sep 2008 04:00:00 +0100

Jennifer Howard, Congressional Hearing Over Public Access Filled With High Drama, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 12, 2008 (accessible only to subscribers). Excerpt: A life-and-death battle is going on over public access to federally financed research —life for taxpayers and many scientists, and death for publishers. Or so each side claims.... Elias A. Zerhouni, director of the NIH, led off with a passionate case for PubMed [Central] as "a vital component of 21st-century science." He presented a timeline of breakthroughs related to the Human Genome Project to demonstrate what he called "a true explosion in scientific discovery," one accelerated by researchers' access to unprecedented amounts of data. The NIH's public-access policy, Dr. Zerhouni argued, helps speed up the pace of discovery by making knowledge widely available. "We fully believe it is consistent with copyright law," he said. He also pointed out that the NIH policy allows for an embargo twice as long as the standard period in Canada, Australia, and parts of Europe. Heather D. Joseph, executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, or Sparc, expressed "serious reservations" about the legislation. Ms. Joseph's group speaks for many research libraries, which have been stalwart supporters of public access. Undoing the NIH policy, she said, would limit taxpayers' access to "crucial, health-related information that can make a life-or-death difference in the lives of the American public." ... Yet Ralph Oman, a copyright lawyer who lectures in intellectual-property law at George Washington University Law School, made the case to the committee that "a mandatory federal policy requiring these works to be made available for worldwide distribution is in inherent conflict with copyright" and would threaten publishers' continued existence.... ...

Two public statements from the anti-oa lobby

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 04:00:00 +0100

The DC Principles Coalition (DCPC) and the Professional/Scholarly Publishing (PSP) Division of the Association of American Publishers (AAP) released their joint letter to the House sponsors of the Fair Copyright in Research Works Act (FCRWA), September 10, 2008. This came out before today's hearing on the bill. One of the letter's co-authors, Martin Frank, was a witness at the hearing. Excerpt: ...A recent congressional mandate at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) forces publishers to surrender their copyrighted scientific journal articles for free public access twelve months after publication and sets a dangerous precedent. This mandate in effect reduces copyright protection for this important class of works to only one year. The Fair Copyright in Research Works Act rightly prevents the government from imposing mandates that diminish copyright protection for private-sector, value-added research articles.... Also see the Statement on the FCRWA from Patrick Ross, Executive Director of the Copyright Alliance, September 10, 2008. Excerpt: ...A recent congressional mandate at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) forces publishers to surrender their copyrighted scientific journal articles for free public access 12 months after publication.... “The mere fact that a scientist accepts as part of her funding a federal grant should not enable the federal government to commandeer the resulting research paper and treat it as a public domain work....[T]aking the scientist’s copyrighted interpretation of the data is not fair to other funders, and it is certainly not fair to the publisher. A publisher improves the work through a rigorous peer review process and develops it for publication. Authors and publishers don’t need the feds playing Rumpelstiltskin by returning after a year to take their children away. ...

More publisher objections to the nih policy, and more nih replies

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 04:00:00 +0100

The Professional/Scholarly Publishing (PSP) Division of the Association of American Publishers (AAP) has posted four of its letters to the NIH, objecting to various aspects of the NIH policy, and two responses from the NIH, responding to the objections. The letters range from March to July, 2008. From the AAP/PSP to the NIH: PSP Comments to NIH March 17 Letter to Dr. Elias Zerhouni Re: March 19 Publisher Meeting from AAP and the DC Principles Coalition [April 16, 2008] PSP Comments to NIH May 30 AAP Request for Information – NIH Public Access Policy May 30, 2008 From the NIH to the AAP/PSP: Letter from Dr. Elias Zerhouni denying the Petition for Rulemaking [June 2, 2008] NIH Response to Letter to Dr. Elias Zerhouni Re: March 19 Publisher Meeting from AAP and the DC Principles [July 28, 2008] (Source: Open Access News)

Discussions of national institutes of health’s public access policy

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 04:52:26 +0100

Social Science Research Network (SSRN) carries the preprint of an article about the new National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) Public Access Policy (The impact of government-mandated public access to biomedical research by Kristopher A. Nelson), Open Access News reports. Here is the abstract: On December 26, 2007, President Bush signed the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2008. The bill, which became Public Law 110-161, contained a new requirement that manuscripts developed through funding by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) be made available to the public, free of charge, within one year after publication. This new mandatory requirement struck a compromise position between the existing pay-to-access model of private journal publishers and the potential free-for-all of the public domain. But did it go far enough? Should Congress have adopted a more aggressive policy of opening access to research? Alternatively, did Congress go too far, and as a result have we crippled scientific publishing? From the conclusion: … the move towards greater public access to research is a move in the right direction. The benefits of long-term archiving and free access by those who might not otherwise be able to afford it outweigh the negatives of increased support-staff workload and potentially reduced markets for traditional publishers. Certainly the law could have done more, but in many ways it is up to scientists and researchers themselves to push for greater moves in the direction of open access, if that is what will benefit science and discovery in the long term. Government can only mandate so much; beyond that, it is up to us to go the rest of the way. P.S.: SPARC (Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition) has made available an analysis (NIH Public Access Policy Does Not Affect U.S. Copyright Law) of the NIH Public Access Policy. ...

Sparc and arl refute aap assertions about nih public access policy

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 00:44:00 +0100

SPARC and ARL have released a white paper, NIH Public Access Policy Does Not Affect U.S. Copyright Law, that refutes assertions made by the Association of American Publishers about the NIH Public Access Policy. Here's an excerpt from the Summary: Contrary to the AAP assertions, the NIH Public Access Policy does not affect U.S. copyright law in any way. NIH has added a condition to pre-existing licensing terms in its grant agreements that affirms it can legally provide public access to publicly funded research. This change in the terms of NIH grant agreements is fully consistent with copyright law. Copyright is an author’s right. Researchers are the authors of the articles they write with NIH support. In exchange for substantial federal funding, these researchers voluntarily agree to grant the federal government a license to provide public access to the results of publicly funded research. NIH receives a non-exclusive license from federally funded researchers, who retain their copyrights and are free to enter into traditional publication agreements with biomedical journals or assign these anywhere they so choose, subject to the license to NIH. This change in the terms of the Public Access Policy has no relation to United States compliance with international intellectual property treaties. The Berne Convention on Copyright and the TRIPS Agreement concern the substance of copyright law, not the terms of licenses granted to the United States in exchange for federal funding. It is longstanding federal policy that in all federal contracts that pay for the creation of copyrighted works, the funding agency must receive a copyright license in exchange for federal funding. It is well recognized that these licenses given by authors have no effect on the robust set of protections given to authors in the United States Copyright Act and similarly raise no issues with respect to international copyright law. (Source: DigitalKoans)

Sparc and arl refute aap assertions about nih public access policy

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 00:43:50 +0100

Sparc-arl response to aap re: nih policy

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 04:00:00 +0100

NIH Public Access Policy Does Not Affect U.S. Copyright Law, an analysis by the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition and the Association of Research Libraries, July 11, 2008. See also the full analysis. From the summary: The National Institutes of Health (NIH) recently implemented a congressionally approved Public Access Policy designed to increase the scientific and social impact of NIH funding. ... Although it is clear that the NIH Public Access Policy is simply a routine change in the contract between the NIH and funding recipients, the American Association of Publishers (AAP) submitted an opinion letter to NIH suggesting that this change raised copyright issues including U.S. obligations under international copyright agreements. This AAP Opinion Letter is fundamentally flawed and mischaracterizes the relevant facts and law. Contrary to the AAP assertions, the NIH Public Access Policy does not affect U.S. copyright law in any way. NIH has added a condition to pre-existing licensing terms in its grant agreements that affirms it can legally provide public access to publicly funded research. This change in the terms of NIH grant agreements is fully consistent with copyright law. Copyright is an author’s right. Researchers are the authors of the articles they write with NIH support. In exchange for substantial federal funding, these researchers voluntarily agree to grant the federal government a license to provide public access to the results of publicly funded research. NIH receives a non-exclusive license from federally funded researchers, who retain their copyrights and are free to enter into traditional publication agreements with biomedical journals or assign these anywhere they so choose, subject to the license to NIH. This change in the terms of the Public Access Policy has no relation to United States compliance with international intellectual property treaties. ...

Details on the stanford oa mandate

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 04:00:00 +0100

Before the Stanford University School of Education (SUSE) voted to adopt an OA mandate, it discussed the OA mandate adopted by Harvard Law School in May 2008. Here's the Stanford Q&A about the Harvard policy and the motion unanimously adopted by the SUSE faculty. Thanks to Stanford's John Willinsky for the documents, permission to distribute them, and for his pivotal role in developing the policy at SUSE. From the Q&A about the Harvard policy: Question: What are the benefits of archiving copies of our articles at Stanford and making them freely available to readers? Response: The evidence to date indicates that providing open access to published journal articles in this manner increases the reading of and engagement with the work, which in our case means further use by educators, policymakers and the interested public (most of whom have no other source of access), as well as colleagues and students here and abroad.... Question: What would such an archive of our work look like? Response: On having a journal article published, authors would submit to the publishers a prepared copyright addendum (permitting Stanford to post the work) that would accompany the publishers’ copyright agreement. SUSE would grant to any author who requested it a waiver excusing them from complying with the motion should a publisher refuse to accept the terms of the addendum. SUSE staff would be able to upload the article to the SUSE archive. Once the article was placed in the SUSE archive, readers would be able to find it through the SUSE website by (a) browsing the archive by community or project, author or topic, (b) searching the well indexed archive or (c) clicking on an article link on a faculty member’s or project’s page, as well as through Google and Google Scholar searches.... Question: My only reservation... ...

Sampling the latest comments to the nih

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 04:00:00 +0100

As Comments Close on NIH Implementation, a Common Plea Emerges: Help Us, Library Journal Academic Newswire, June 13, 2008. Excerpt: On May 31, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) closed the comment period on implementing the agency?s recently adopted public access mandate, which went into effect on April 7. Although it is still too early too tell how the implementation process is going in practice, from the 178 responses, which addressed four key questions, a common message seemed to emerge: help us. Respondents included investigators, university and library personnel, and publishers. While expressing varying levels of support or opposition for the NIH mandate itself, all seemed to encourage the NIH to offer more concrete guidance on how to ensure compliance with the access mandate, with efficiency in mind. In comments, respondents cited challenges ranging from confusion over correct citations, to a wide range of policies?from journals, institutions, and funders?that could create confusion for those who must comply. Wyatt Hume, provost of the University of California (UC), wrote that UC remained ?deeply concerned? that the policy does not address ?complexities associated with the loosely-coupled roles of authors, principal investigators, institutions, and publishers.? Hume also observed that ?publishers are under no obligation to assist, or even permit, authors to retain the rights needed to deposit their manuscripts in PubMed Central in compliance with the policy, and the authors? institutions generally have neither the legal standing nor the means to intervene.? This ?ambiguity about rights? is amplified, Hume noted, by the range of compliance methods that have emerged among publishers. ...

Intellectual freedom and ethics programs at 2008 ala annual conference

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 19:28:04 +0100

For those attending this month's ALA Annual Conference in Anaheim, we hope you'll be able to attend some or all of these exciting programs! IF 101 Friday, June 27 5:00 p.m. - 6:00 p.m. 304 A/B, Anaheim Convention Center Perfect for new ALA members, new conference attendees, and new Intellectual Freedom fanatics, this session - part of ALA's "Conference 101" series of programs - will discuss the history and ongoing work of OIF, IFC, IFRT, FTRF, the Merritt Fund, and more! Curious to know what those acronyms mean? Want to get more involved in this critical aspect of librarianship? This is the session for you! Freedom of Expression®: Resistance and Repression in the Age of Intellectual Property Saturday, June 28 1:30 p.m. – 3:30 p.m. 304 A/B, Anaheim Convention Center Sponsored by the Intellectual Freedom Round Table and the Intellectual Freedom Committee This screening of Freedom of Expression®: Resistance and Repression in the Age of Intellectual Property will be followed by a panel discussion about fair use and free speech with co-producers Kembrew McLeod and Jeremy Smith, and others. Based on McLeod's award-winning book of the same title, Freedom of Expression® explores the battles being waged in courts, classrooms, museums, film studios, and the Internet over control of our cultural commons. Politics of Differences: Cultural Sensitivities and Global Ethics for Libraries and Librarians Saturday, June 28 1:30 p.m. – 3:30 p.m. 204A Anaheim Convention Center Sponsored by the Committee on Professional Ethics How can we build a global ethical framework for the library and information profession based a common ground of values while also respecting the diversity of historically and culturally based ethical values that provide the foundation for library and information services throughout the world? Dr. Nancy P. ...

Progress towards public access to science - harold varmus on the nih policy

Fri, 30 May 2008 18:43:12 +0100

Harold Varmus, Progress toward Public Access to Science, PLoS Biology, April 8, 2008. An editorial. Varmus is the President of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, co-founder of the Public Library of Science, former director of the NIH (1993-1999), and the 1989 Nobel laureate for physiology or medicine. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is about to cross an important threshold. Starting April 7th, the authors of research reports that describe work supported by the NIH will be required to deposit accepted manuscripts into PubMed Central (PMC), the NIH’s public digital library of full-text articles, with the understanding that the articles will be freely available for all to view no later than 12 months after publication. This is a landmark event from several perspectives. Most obviously, it further accelerates the world-wide movement toward greater access to the scientific literature, markedly increasing the number of articles freely available to read online. By taking this step, the NIH will join other funding agencies—including the Wellcome Trust, the UK Research Councils, the European Research Council, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute—all of which have recently required their investigators to deposit publications in PMC or equivalent public libraries, such as UKPMC, within six months to a year. Since NIH-supported investigators publish about 80,000 papers each year, many of them in journals that currently do not contribute their articles to PMC, the library will soon grow at about twice its already impressive rate. With an enlarged PMC, the virtues of full-text searches and ready access will be more obvious, encouraging still greater participation by authors of work not funded by the agencies that mandate deposition. As we all know, scientists want their work to be found, read, and cited. ...

More on the acs position on oa

Thu, 15 May 2008 04:00:00 +0100

Bob Michaelson, The American Chemical Society and Open Access, Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship, Winter 2008. Excerpt: ...Unfortunately, serious conversation [about OA] is ill-served by some publishers’ strategies, including, regrettably, those pursued by the American Chemical Society. Editorials in Chemical & Engineering News as far back as 2004 denounced OA as "socialized science" -- whatever that is supposed to mean. In 2005 Nobel Laureate Robert J. Richards published an open letter announcing his resignation from ACS out of disgust at the Society's opposition to OA. In January 2007 Nature (445, 25 January 2007, 347) reported that ACS was among a group of members of the Association of American Publishers (AAP) that hired "pit bull" Eric Dezenhall to attack the Open Access movement. Dezenhall advised the publishers to focus on simple messages (more honestly: simple-minded dissembling slogans), such as "public access equals government censorship." Indeed, ACS senior Vice President Brian Crawford told Nature,"[w]hen any government or funding agency houses and disseminates for public consumption only the work it itself funds, that constitutes a form of selection and self-promotion of that entity's interests." By mid-2007 Dezenhall had founded PRISM ("Partnership for Research Integrity in Science and Medicine" – "integrity" is presumably used in the Rovian sense), launched by the Executive Council of the Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division of the AAP. ...

Brian crawford on oa

Thu, 15 May 2008 04:00:00 +0100

Sian Harris interviews Brian Crawford in the April/May issue of Research Information. Crawford is the President of Publications division of the American Chemical Society (ACS) and Chairman of the Executive Council of the Professional/Scholarly Publishing (PSP) Division of the Association of American Publishers (AAP). He was chair of the PSP/AAP Executive Council at the time it hired Dezenhall Resources and launched PRISM. Excerpt: What are your views on open access? We [at the ACS] are in favour of various access models and think authors should have the right to choose. We don’t think that governments or others should mandate what authors do and require them to pay. Immediately on publication each of our authors is given a link that they can put on their websites or funding body’s site free of charge. There is a limit of 50 downloads of their paper in the first year. If the author wants to place the whole article on their website or funding body’s site then we have our ‘AuthorChoice’ model where authors pay to make their articles open access. Most of our revenue comes from subscriptions, with a bit from advertising. We don’t see many authors choosing the AuthorChoice option. We’ve had this model out for about a year and less than one per cent of papers are published this way. Not all authors have access to funds that they could use to pay to publish and most of our authors are pleased with the access that others have to their papers anyway. We enable authors to submit their raw data too. We put this outside our firewall so it is open to non-subscribers too but we do not tag this information. We left the matter of putting preprints in repositories to editorial discretion on the individual journals and the editors have chosen not to allow this. After publication there is the option to have the free authordirected link or to pay for open access. ...

Rockefeller up supports nih policy, again

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 04:00:00 +0100

Mike Rossner, Executive Director of Rockefeller University Press, has released his April 21, 2008, letter to the NIH. Excerpt: Dear Dr. Zerhouni, Once again, I am compelled to respond to a letter [April 16, 2008] from Allan Adler [of the Association of American Publishers] and Martin Frank [of the DC Principles Coalition] regarding the mandate on public access to NIH-funded research. The private meetings between yourself and this particular group of publishers (who continue to imply in their letters that they speak for all publishers) are now legendary. How many times will they insist on meeting with you before they acknowledge that they have been given a chance to have their say? Compliance with the NIH mandate by publishers is the right thing to do, is simple to do, and is the law. There is no need for a further rulemaking proceeding. Many of the implementation issues raised in the April 16th letter could be resolved if these publishers simply cooperated with PubMed Central and deposited their published content there, for release to the public after 12 months. I trust that they consider their content sufficiently interesting to the scientific community to sustain subscription revenues by selling access during the first 12 months post-publication. It seems that this group of publishers is primarily concerned with sustaining the substantial profits they make on the backs of public funding and through their reactionary stance on intellectual property. It is time to move forward with implementation of the mandate using 21st century principles, by which the people who did the research retain rights over its distribution. PS: For background, see some of the earlier open letters in which Rossner supports OA and the NIH policy against the AAP and DC Principles Coalition. (Source: Open Access News)

Open textbooks at ucla

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 04:00:00 +0100

Chris Eldredge, Professors sign on to open-access textbooks, The Daily Bruin, April 17, 2008. Excerpt: The free online textbook Professor Jake Lusis uses for his mouse genetics class is the best book he could find. Students can buy a printed copy of the book, but the microbiology, immunology and molecular genetics professor said many of his students prefer the online version.... Largely because the online textbook in his genetics class has been well-received, Lusis decided to sign a statement pledging to consider open textbooks when deciding on the most appropriate texts for his classes.... The California Public Interest Research Group, which organized the statement, announced 1,000 signatures Tuesday.... “Textbook affordability is a critical issue for today’s students, with textbook costs rising faster than inflation and tuition, textbooks can price students out of higher education,” said [Nicole Allen, textbook advocate for CALPIRG].... Bruce Hildebrand, executive director for higher education at the Association of American Publishers, said writing a textbook takes an enormous amount of time and the association supports authors willing to donate that time by releasing free online books.... Christine Borgman, professor and presidential chair of the information studies department, signed the statement partly because she was already active in the movement for open access to academic material. Borgman, who has written about open access in her recent book, “Scholarship in the Digital Age,” said freely available academic information is not necessarily of lower quality. “There are some very expensive journals that don’t have very good articles in them, and then there are some free open-access journals that are among the top in their field,” she said.... ...

Researchers develop online tools for science collaborations

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 06:45:12 +0100

The most effective tools of the Internet for scientists and engineers tend to be those efforts more narrowly targeted to their needs, according to many presentators at the annual conference of the Professional/Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers . Several tools of note **Clinical Decisions at the Web site of The New England Journal of Medicine presents a fictional patient with a condition that can be legitimately treated in multiple ways. An expert on the patient’s disease writes an argument to back each of three possible treatments. Then at the Web site, readers of the journal vote on which treatment they would choose, and can leave comments. ** SciVee allows scientists to link videos to their research papers that appear in open-access biomedical journals. The videos (or pubcasts) are typically about 10 minutes long and go into more detail than an abstract but less than the full-length article. ** GenePattern stores both data and analytical routines. As the researcher works to collect and analyze the data, GenePattern records the steps the scientist has taken, so that anyone else can follow the steps and check the result or expand on the method using new data. For more information, please do not hesitate to contact Mulford Reference Assistance. (Source: Mulford Library Blog)

The oa tsunami

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 04:00:00 +0100

Lee C. Van Orsdel and Kathleen Born, Periodicals Price Survey 2008: Embracing Openness, Library Journal, April 15, 2008. The latest installment in the superb series of annual reports on journal prices and the state of OA (2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003...). Van Orsdel is the Dean of University Libraries at Grand Valley State University, and Kathleen Born is Director of the Academic Division at EBSCO Information Services. Excerpt: They have argued about it for years. It's been touted as the liberator of information that wants to be free, the arbiter of shared intellectual property rights, and an engine that can drive discovery, invention, cures, and economies. It has also been vilified as an assault on capitalism, a catalyst for the collapse of responsible publishing and the rise of junk science, and a naïve invention of some pointy-headed idealists who have no idea how the real world works. “It,” of course, is open access (OA).... [The OA] campaign has produced a series of startling successes in recent months, with potentially profound implications for the journal publishing industry. First came a long-awaited mandate, signed into law on December 26, requiring the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to provide open access to grantees' peer-reviewed research articles within 12 months of publication. As blogs hummed with speculation about how libraries would be affected and whether publishers would take it to court, another shoe dropped. The European Research Council announced the first European Union (EU)–wide mandate on January 10, calling for grant recipients to put research articles and supporting data on the web within six months of publication. As that news was being absorbed, 791 universities in 46 European countries voted unanimously to endorse OA mandates for faculty at their institutions and to support other mandates for access to publicly funded research. ...

More on the aap complaints about the nih policy

Sat, 05 Apr 2008 04:00:00 +0100

Matt Jones, Publishers Still Unhappy with Congress, NIH over Open Access Law, GenomeWeb Daily News, April 4, 2008. Free registration required. Excerpt: ...According to [a publishing] industry attorney, scientific publishers could seek a legal remedy later this year. “[There] was simply no sound reason for Congress to subsequently allow an appropriations rider to take an inconsistent and more controversial route toward … enhancing public access to the results of scientific research,” Alan Adler, vice president of legal and government affairs for the American Association of Publishers, responded after the bill became law.... Under the Administrative Procedures Act of 1946, agencies are to follow an ordered process in implementing such new policies, including notifying the public, inviting written comments, considering comments, and publishing a final rule not less than 30 days before the policy takes effect, and publishing a statement explaining the purposes of the rule. “Here the NIH has adopted a program of implement first and ask questions later,” Adler told GenomeWeb Daily News today. The AAP has written to NIH Director Elias Zerhouni attempting to get the agency to follow that procedure, and earlier this week the NIH announced a request for information notice — a call for comments and recommendations that would give anyone who is concerned or confused about the law the chance to find out more about the details of the policy or to point out problems they have with it.... “We wanted NIH to propose how they’re were going to implement policy, then take public comments, and then to respond to those comments about what they were going to do about them,” Adler said, because that is the way the Administrative Procedures Act works. ...

Several publisher associations release joint statement on journal publishing agreements and copyright agreement addenda

Tue, 11 Mar 2008 03:55:24 +0100

The International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers (STM), the Professional/Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers (PSP), and the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) have released the "STM/PSP/ALPSP Statement on Journal Publishing Agreements and Copyright Agreement 'Addenda'." Here's an excerpt from the STM press release: The debate on the rights that authors have (or indeed it is claimed inaccurately, do not have) over their published works continues to rage, and much coverage has been given to purportedly restrictive practices or policies, when in fact they do not exist for the majority of publishers. The most recent examples surround the vote of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard for university ownership and distribution of research papers (February 2008). One advocate of the Harvard policy claims that this step was taken because "the scholarly publishing system has become far more restrictive than it need be [… m]any publishers will not even allow scholars to use and distribute their own work." (See http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2008/02.14/99-fasvote.html). This is not only an inaccurate perception of the role of publishers and copyright, but also means that advocating authors to modify existing journal publishing agreements with "copyright addenda" is simply a call for needless bureaucracy. . . . STM publishers invariably allow the authors of journal articles to use their published papers in their own teaching and for educational purposes generally within their institutions. Most journals have policies that permit authors to provide copies of their papers to research colleagues, and to re-use portions of their papers in further works or books. ...

Senator wants more consultation with publishers on nih policy

Mon, 25 Feb 2008 05:00:00 +0100

Susan Morrisey, Specter Speaks Up On Public Access, Chemical & Engineering News, February 25, 2008. Just over a month after NIH announced its mandatory public access policy for research that it funds, some in Congress are questioning whether the agency did enough to gather input from journal publishers.... In a letter to NIH Director Elias A. Zerhouni, Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), ranking member of the appropriations subcommittee that oversees NIH's funding, questions whether the agency has acted in the spirit of the congressional directive with regard to talking to journal publishers.... "I am concerned that the NIH is not taking the appropriate steps to seek out and take into account the advice of journal editors," Specter writes. The mandatory public access policy notice put out by NIH in January, he explains, "did not outline a process for seeking the advice and comment of journal publishers, scientists, or any other interested parties." Specter adds that the notice also did not provide details on "how the policy would be implemented in a manner consistent with copyright law." This has been an issue of concern to journal publishers, which include the American Chemical Society, the publisher of C&EN.... In response to Specter's concerns, Norka Ruiz Bravo, deputy director of extramural research at NIH, tells C&EN that NIH will be responding directly to Specter, but she would not elaborate on any details. She did point out that NIH has been talking with publishers throughout the development of the public access policy and that the agency plans on "continuing to take input as it rolls through with the implementation." Comments This is about publisher lobbying that won't give up, not about the merits of the NIH policy or Congressional support for it. ...

More comments on the harvard oa policy

Fri, 22 Feb 2008 05:00:00 +0100

Here's another batch of comments on the new Harvard OA mandate. From the anonymous author of Easily Distracted: I’m very pleased by the vote in favor of open-access at Harvard. Not just because of open-access, but because it shows that it’s possible for faculty to choose dramatic changes or reforms in their way of business.... From an editorial in the Los Angeles Times: They didn't get to Harvard by being stupid, you know. So it's not surprising that professors at the Ivy League school voted to place their scholarly articles online. They have much to gain and little to lose -- and their experiment has much for the rest of us to like as well.... [PS: The rest of the editorial incorrectly assumes that the purpose of the policy is to "bypass scholarly journals" and peer review. UCLA Litbrarian was the first to correct the error.] From Andrew Lawler in Science (accessible only to subscribers): ...[P]ublishers say they doubt it will significantly affect their business.... The Harvard decision...“is not mandatory,” notes Patricia Schroeder, president of the Association of American Publishers in Washington, D.C. “I don’t think anyone is quaking in their boots.” Alan Leshner, chief executive officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (which publishes Science), says that the new policy won’t affect publishing criteria, although it could pose “a bureaucratic problem for faculty members.” ... Schroeder says it is too early to measure the impact of the new policy and warns that “publishers may not be quite as excited to take articles from Harvard.” ... (Source: Open Access News)

More on the harvard policy

Thu, 21 Feb 2008 05:00:00 +0100

Lila Guterman, Celebrations and Tough Questions Follow Harvard's Move to Open Access, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 21, 2008 (accessible only to subscribers). Excerpt: ...Other universities (as well as other schools within Harvard), said [Peter Suber], will want to adopt similar policies in order "either to keep up with Harvard or get the synergistic benefit, because the more [institutions] do it, the more publishers will have to accommodate [it]." ... "It changes the default position in the negotiation" between authors and publishers, says Michael W. Carroll, a professor at the Villanova University School of Law, who is an open-access advocate. "It does mean that the authors are choosing to stand closer together instead of having to deal with the publishers one on one." The University of California has been working for several years on a policy that resembles Harvard's. Comments on its draft last year reflected "almost universal support for the concept," says Gary S. Lawrence, director of systemwide library planning, "but a great deal of concern about the implementation details." Harvard's success in creating an arrangement that faculty members agreed on, he says, "provides us a lot of encouragement." Harvard's new policy makes no mention of any delay between the time of publication in a journal and the paper's being made free online, a provision that some publishers require, and which the NIH allows in its policy. Faculty members who choose to publish in journals with that requirement can apply to waive or modify Harvard's license to post their papers online, says [Stuart M. Shieber, a professor of computer science who proposed the open-access policy to the faculty].... [C]omplaints about the policy were muted. (Some have appeared on The Chronicle's Brainstorm blog.) Patricia S. ...

Harvard breathes new life into open access

Tue, 12 Feb 2008 19:21:54 +0100

This just in from the NYT: February 12, 2008 At Harvard, a Proposal to Publish Free on Web By PATRICIA COHEN Publish or perish has long been the burden of every aspiring university professor. But the question the Harvard faculty will decide on Tuesday is whether to publish — on the Web, at least — free. Faculty members are scheduled to vote on a measure that would permit Harvard to distribute their scholarship online, instead of signing exclusive agreements with scholarly journals that often have tiny readerships and high subscription costs. Although the outcome of Tuesday’s vote would apply only to Harvard’s arts and sciences faculty, the impact, given the university’s prestige, could be significant for the open-access movement, which seeks to make scientific and scholarly research available to as many people as possible at no cost. “In place of a closed, privileged and costly system, it will help open up the world of learning to everyone who wants to learn,” said Robert Darnton, director of the university library. “It will be a first step toward freeing scholarship from the stranglehold of commercial publishers by making it freely available on our own university repository.” Under the proposal Harvard would deposit finished papers in an open-access repository run by the library that would instantly make them available on the Internet. Authors would still retain their copyright and could publish anywhere they pleased — including at a high-priced journal, if the journal would have them. What distinguishes this plan from current practice, said Stuart Shieber, a professor of computer science who is sponsoring the faculty motion, is that it would create an “opt-out” system: an article would be included unless the author specifically requested it not be. Mr. Shieber was the chairman of a committee set up by Harvard’s provost to investigate scholarly publishing; this proposal grew out of one of the recommendations, he said. ...

Nih mandates open access to researchers’ publications

Wed, 06 Feb 2008 17:04:18 +0100

PUBLIC ACCESS MANDATE MADE LAW President Bush signs omnibus appropriations bill, including National Institutes of Health research access provision Alliance for Taxpayer Access News Release Washington, D.C. – December 26, 2007 – President Bush has signed into law the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2007 (H.R. 2764), which includes a provision directing the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to provide the public with open online access to findings from its funded research. This is the first time the U.S. government has mandated public access to research funded by a major agency. The provision directs the NIH to change its existing Public Access Policy, implemented as a voluntary measure in 2005, so that participation is required for agency-funded investigators. Researchers will now be required to deposit electronic copies of their peer-reviewed manuscripts into the National Library of Medicine’s online archive, PubMed Central. Full texts of the articles will be publicly available and searchable online in PubMed Central no later than 12 months after publication in a journal. “Facilitated access to new knowledge is key to the rapid advancement of science,” said Harold Varmus, president of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and Nobel Prize Winner. “The tremendous benefits of broad, unfettered access to information are already clear from the Human Genome Project, which has made its DNA sequences immediately and freely available to all via the Internet. Providing widespread access, even with a one-year delay, to the full text of research articles supported by funds from all institutes at the NIH will increase those benefits dramatically.” “Public access to publicly funded research contributes directly to the mission of higher education,” said David Shulenburger, Vice President for Academic Affairs at NASULGC (the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges). ...

What’s next, post-nih mandate?

Wed, 06 Feb 2008 17:02:48 +0100

Robin Peek, What’s Next Post Mandate? A preprint of her Focus on Publishing column to appear in the March issue of Information Today. The preprint will come down at the end of February and the postprint will go up three months after publication. Excerpt: …NIH tells submitters that: “Before you sign a publication agreement or similar copyright transfer agreement, make sure that the agreement allows the article to be submitted to NIH in accordance with the Public Access Policy.’ However what the NIH does not explain how the mandate will work with publishers who are not already in compliance with the guidelines. The NIH notes that,” Institutions and investigators are responsible for ensuring that any publishing or copyright agreements concerning submitted articles fully comply with this Policy. Peter Suber, author of the SPARC Open Access News, observes “the policy makes no exceptions for dissenting publishers, does not depend on publisher consent, and simply requires grantee compliance. This clearly implies that if a publisher does not accommodate the NIH policy, and grantees cannot obtain special permission to comply with it, then they must look for another publisher.” … One thing to keep in mind is that not all publishers object to this law as a good number of biomedical research journals…[already] submit [their articles] to PMC. Despite the strongly worded press releases from the major lobbying groups such the Association of American Publishers and the STM Publishers vowing to keep up the fight opposing the law…fighting the Congress and the President really has become old and its time to move on to other things. For example, Martin Frank, executive director of the American Physiological Society, noted in a January 11, 2008 issue of Science. ‘Journals will have to step up their policing by asking NIH to remove articles that have been mistakenly posted because they are still under embargo or are too old to fall under the policy. ...

The business model of wit press

Wed, 06 Feb 2008 05:00:00 +0100

Richard Poynder interviews Carlos Brebbia, director of WIT Press. Excerpt: Scholarly publishing finds itself at a difficult transitional stage today. In response, some publishers have decided to behave badly — as evidenced by the actions of publisher lobbying organisations like PRISM. But as Alma Swan recently pointed out to me, most of this bad behaviour emanates from a small group of four or five large publishers, "not the hundreds and hundreds of publishers out there, most of whom are starting to understand that Open Access is the way of the future." The problem for these other publishers, however, is that the behaviour of PRISM — along with the questionable activities of organisations like the Association of American Publishers (AAP), and the apparent greed of not-for-profit organisations like the American Chemical Society (ACS) — is tarring all publishers with the same brush, and making researchers understandably suspicious of anyone calling themselves a publisher. This was demonstrated for me recently when I was passed an e-mail sent to a researcher by Carlos Brebbia, the director of a small academic publishing company called WIT Press, which produces two journals. In line with WIT's new Open Access policy, the e-mail asked the researcher to pay a €50 per-page publication fee. Brebbia added, "I have checked our records and your institution has not yet subscribed. Will it be possible to request them to do so? It is cheaper to pay the subscription of €450/$550 rather than the €50 per page." The e-mail was passed to me as evidence that WIT Press was behaving badly and, in the process, giving Open Access a bad name. So I contacted Brebbia and asked him about his journal publishing activities, and how he is adapting to a world in which, as he himself puts it, "Open Access is a reality." ... ...

More on the nih oa mandate

Sun, 03 Feb 2008 05:00:00 +0100

Robin Peek, What’s Next Post Mandate? A preprint of her Focus on Publishing column to appear in the March issue of Information Today. The preprint will come down at the end of this month and the postprint will go up three months after publication. Excerpt: ...NIH tells submitters that: “Before you sign a publication agreement or similar copyright transfer agreement, make sure that the agreement allows the article to be submitted to NIH in accordance with the Public Access Policy.’ However what the NIH does not explain how the mandate will work with publishers who are not already in compliance with the guidelines. The NIH notes that,” Institutions and investigators are responsible for ensuring that any publishing or copyright agreements concerning submitted articles fully comply with this Policy. Peter Suber, author of the SPARC Open Access News, observes “the policy makes no exceptions for dissenting publishers, does not depend on publisher consent, and simply requires grantee compliance. This clearly implies that if a publisher does not accommodate the NIH policy, and grantees cannot obtain special permission to comply with it, then they must look for another publisher.” ... One thing to keep in mind is that not all publishers object to this law as a good number of biomedical research journals...[already] submit [their articles] to PMC. Despite the strongly worded press releases from the major lobbying groups such the Association of American Publishers and the STM Publishers vowing to keep up the fight opposing the law...fighting the Congress and the President really has become old and its time to move on to other things. For example, Martin Frank, executive director of the American Physiological Society, noted in a January 11, 2008 issue of Science. ...

Aap pressures universities to limit fair use

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 05:00:00 +0100

Andrea Foster, Despite Skeptics, Publishers Tout New 'Fair Use' Agreements With Universities, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 17, 2008 (accessible only to subscribers). Excerpt: The battle line between publishers and colleges, who have been fighting over campus access to digital versions of books and journals, shifted slightly in favor of the publishers on Wednesday. The Association of American Publishers announced it had reached an agreement with Hofstra, Marquette, and Syracuse Universities to limit distribution of electronic content for students. The policies may be too vague, however, to actually help professors and librarians figure out what they can rightfully access. And one of the universities said the agreement was made under duress. Each university, urged by the publishers, has produced guidelines governing electronic reserves, a system that libraries and professors use to make portions of books and journals available free online to students. The documents broadly state that the colleges will respect copyright law, will consider four factors in deciding whether to distribute course material, and will not assume that material elsewhere on the Internet can be redistributed without publishers' approval.... Most colleges agree that material placed on electronic reserves, or e-reserves, should be password protected and available only to students. But some college lawyers say that providing the material to students is allowed under fair use and that their institutions don't need publishers' prior approval. Further, many colleges complain that publishers are making unreasonable demands with respect to e-reserves, said Prudence S. Adler, associate executive director of the Association of Research Libraries. Some publishers have asked colleges to pay for e-reserve content, even though the colleges have license agreements that already allow them to use the material in digital format, she added.... ...

More on the new nih oa policy

Sat, 12 Jan 2008 05:00:00 +0100

Jocelyn Kaiser, NIH Announces Public-Access Policy, Science, January 11, 2008. Excerpt: Starting in April, most U.S. biomedical scientists will have to send copies of their accepted, peer-reviewed manuscripts to the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) for posting in a free archive. If they don't, they could have trouble renewing their grants or even lose research funding. That's the gist of NIH's announcement today describing how it will carry out a new "public access" mandate.... Making sure that submissions comply with the journals' copyright policy is up to investigators and their institutions. The policy applies only to peer-reviewed research and reviews, not editorials or book chapters, NIH says. To motivate scientists, NIH will require that investigators include the PubMed Central or NIH submission number for all applicable papers referenced in their grant applications and progress reports. Other possible ways of enforcing the policy include a call from an NIH program director and suspension of funds, says NIH Deputy Director for Extramural Research Norka Ruiz Bravo. "We hope we're not going to get there," she says. The public-access policy has long been controversial. Some researchers and publishers worry about confusion resulting from having two versions of the article online: the PubMed Central author manuscript, which hasn't been copyedited, and the published paper. Many publishers also fret that making articles free will cut into subscription income needed to run journals and fund society activities. The Association of American Publishers has warned that a mandatory policy "undermines" publishers’ copyright and is "inconsistent with" U.S. laws (Science, 11 January, p. 145). The association also says that the rule limits academic freedom by preventing researchers from publishing in journals that don't comply. ...

"publishers are not the content creators, nor should they be the content owners"

Tue, 08 Jan 2008 05:00:00 +0100

Matthew Cockerill, NIH Public Access Policy to become mandatory, BioMed Central blog, January 7, 2008. Cockerill is the publisher of BioMed Central. Excerpt: Many open access advocates will already have heard that NIH's Public Access Policy, until now voluntary, is set to become mandatory.... This is great news both for researchers and for the general public. Peter Suber's January SPARC Open Access Newsletter contains a detailed analysis of what the change means, and identifies some of the key issues that remain to be resolved. Perhaps predictably, the publishing organizations who had lobbied strenuously but unsuccessfully against the new policy have lost no time in issuing statements condemning it and forecasting dire consequences. Statements from the Association of American Publishers and STM appear to take the curious position that it is the publishing organizations who are the rightful owners of the intellectual results of scientific research, and that the NIH is taking an appalling liberty by asserting, on behalf of the public, any rights at all over these results. According to the AAP: "[C]hanging to a new mandatory policy that will ‘require’ such submission eliminates the concept of permission, and effectively allows the agency to take important publisher property interests without compensation, including the value added to the article by the publishers’ investments in the peer review process and other quality-assurance aspects of journal publication. ...

More on the oa mandate for the nih

Sun, 06 Jan 2008 05:00:00 +0100

Robin Peek, NIH OA Mandate Passes, a preprint of a column to appear in the February issue of Information Today. According to IT's new access policy, "The preprint will be removed on January 31st and the postprint will be posted 3 months after publication." Excerpt: ...And in one final dashing of the pen, it was done, the National Institute of Health had a mandate to make all of its funded research OA. A requirement that represents a historic first for a U.S. government agency and one of the largest single mandates world-wide.... I am enjoying this quiet blissful tranquility putting aside in my mind the knowledge that the publishing lobby is no doubt sharpening its lawyers and drafting their own counter defensive. But while it is cliché to use the phrase, there has indeed been a sea change.... At this point it is too early to know how different Federal agencies and even other funding agencies countries will respond differently to the passage of this mandate. As Steven Harnad observes, I think the NIH victory is itself part of a surge of activity in OA mandates. NIH's is a big one so it will help spur others. The big surge now, however, will be in institutional mandates all over the world. According to the Registry of Open Access Repositories, there are now “21 funder-mandates, 11 institutional-mandates, and 3 departmental-mandates, plus 5 proposed-funder-mandates, 1 proposed-institutional-mandate, and 2 proposed-multi-institutional-mandates (worldwide) a total of 35 mandates already adopted and 8 more proposed so far.” “It will trigger more mandates, particularly among other federal agencies in the US. Some will wait to see how the mandate works out at the NIH, but some already want to adopt OA policies and are only waiting for a green light from Congress. ...

Nih mandate: publisher opposition

Fri, 04 Jan 2008 16:31:00 +0100

The Association of American Publishers has issued a press release clearly indicating plans to continue fighting the NIH public access mandate. For the full press release and a very thorough rebuttal, see Peter Suber's Open Access News.One of the points raised is a call for further public consultation and comments. Hmmm...there hasn't been enough debate about the merits of OA yet? Really? Not a problem! I wouldn't mind seeing more discussion about debate about OA policy, not at all. Let's open up discussion about the allowance for a 12-month embargo, for example. This is more than generous to the diminishing portion of the publishing community which prefers not to adapt to an open access environment. If it's not appreciated, why not eliminate provision for the embargo? There are many gold and green publishers who can provide the needed coordination of peer review, without the embargo. The AAP might wish to argue that this limits the intellectual freedom of researchers, but this is argument is not correct. Researchers who do not wish to comply with any of the requirements of funding agencies (they have many, not just OA dissemination of results), need not seek funding. Or, they can accept funding, and work with colleagues to start up their own journals! Come to think of it - the start-up time for a new journal might correlate fairly well with the time it takes to receive a grant, conduct the research and write up the results for publication - especially if there are a number of researchers in your field in the same situation with the same incentive to create change.Subscribe to OA Librarian (Source: OA Librarian)

More on the imminent oa mandate at the nih

Fri, 21 Dec 2007 05:00:00 +0100

Rick Weiss, Measure Would Require Free Access To Results of NIH-Funded Research, Washington Post, December 21, 2007. Excerpt: It is barely a drop of ink in the gargantuan omnibus spending bill that Congress just passed. But a provision that would give the public free access to the results of federally funded biomedical research represents a sweet victory for a coalition of researchers and activists who lobbied for the language for years. Under the bill's terms, scientists getting grant money from the National Institutes of Health would now have to submit to the NIH a final copy of their research papers when those papers are accepted for publication in a journal. An NIH database would then post those papers, free to the public, within 12 months after publication. The idea is that taxpayers, who have already paid for the research, should not have to subscribe to expensive scientific journals to read about the results. That populist line -- spearheaded by patient advocacy groups seeking easier access to the latest medical findings and supported by libraries whose budgets have had trouble keeping up with rising journal subscription costs -- ultimately overwhelmed objections from journal publishers.... Among the publishers' concerns are that they would lose income from paid subscriptions, which would undermine their ability to sponsor educational activities and peer reviews. Of equal concern, they say, the policy may violate copyright law, a potential legal tangle that some hinted yesterday might have to get sorted out in court. "The issue isn't finished yet," said Allan R. Adler, vice president for legal and governmental affairs at the Association of American Publishers, which lobbied hard against passage. "It's not as simple as some have made this out to be. ...

More on society publishers with oa journals

Sat, 03 Nov 2007 04:00:00 +0100

Gavin Baker, Scholarly societies and open access publishing, This place is pretty ugly, November 2, 2007. Excerpt: In the latest SPARC Open Access Newsletter, Peter Suber posts the results of research with Caroline Sutton on scholarly society publishers with open access journals. At its core is a list of open access journals affiliated with scholarly societies and various characteristics associated; the post contains some analysis. The list and analysis also considers society journals with hybrid open access options. The information is quite interesting, and practical (for decision-makers and OA advocates). The authors note that they’d like to explore the topic in greater depth. Here, then, are my comments — hopefully useful for Phase Two. The number of societies involved, and the number of journals published, is large, accounting for 16% of the Directory of Open Access Journals (450 out of 2900). The number of open access journals is considerably larger than the number of journals with hybrid OA options (450 vs. 73). The geographic base of OA-publishing societies is broad — 57 countries/regions — compared to just 5 countries/regions with hybrid journals (93% of which is composed of the US and UK). (Note: I’m not clear whether the “geographic location” listing in the chart is based on the society’s location or the journal’s. For example, European Physical Journal is published by Societá Italiana di Fisica; the location is listed as “Europe”. I’d appreciate if the authors could clarify this.) Similarly, the publisher:journal ratio for open access journals is much lower than that of hybrid journals. “Most societies publishing OA journals publish just one. […] Only five societies publish just one hybrid journal. ...

More on the nih policy

Thu, 01 Nov 2007 04:00:00 +0100

Rick Weiss, Open Access to Research Funded by U.S. at Issue, Washington Post, November 1, 2007. Excerpt: A long-simmering debate over whether the results of government-funded research should be made freely available to the public could take a big step toward resolution as members of a House and Senate conference committee meet today to finalize the 2008 Department of Health and Human Services appropriations bill. At issue is whether scientists funded by the National Institutes of Health should be required to publish the results of their research solely in journals that promise to make the articles available free within a year after publication. The idea is that consumers should not have to buy expensive scientific journal subscriptions -- or pricey per-page charges for nonsubscribers -- to see the results of research they have already paid for with their taxes. Until now, repeated efforts to legislate such a mandate have failed under pressure from the well-heeled journal publishing industry and some nonprofit scientific societies whose educational activities are supported by the profits from journals that they publish. But proponents -- including patient advocates, who want easy access to the latest biomedical findings, and cash-strapped libraries looking for ways to temper escalating subscription costs -- have parlayed their consumer-friendly "public access" message into legislative language that has made it into the Senate and House versions of the new HHS bill. That has set the stage for a last-minute lobbying showdown. "There's been loads of debate and discussion, and at last it's going forward," said Heather Joseph, executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, a Washington-based library group. She has been a persistent presence on Capitol Hill, making the case for open access.... ...

Controversy at the american chemical society, part ii

Mon, 29 Oct 2007 15:06:00 +0100

Noted without comment, an email from a few days ago:Dear Sir/Madam,I am writing you this email in allegiance with the original Insider at the American Chemical Society. The Chronicle of Higher Education confirmed last week that executive bonuses at the American Chemical Society are tied to the financial success of their publishing division. This money may be influencing opposition to Open Access publishing by ACS executives. The executive director pulls in almost $1 million annually.To prevent Open Access:ACS Editor Rudy Baum has written numerous opposing editorials in Chemical & Engineering News.The Society has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars for lobbyists.ACS Publishing Executive, Brian Crawford, helped hire a suspect PR firm which created a covert organization called Partnership for Research Integrity in Science and Medicine (PRISM).Question: Is ACS being run in the interest of members or to fatten the wallets of its executives? Please reference the following time line with supporting sources.[1] Sept 2004 - Rudy Baum writes an editorial in C&EN entitled "Socialized Science." Rudy argues, "Open access, in fact, equates with socialized science." Rudy does not mention that bonuses for ACS publishing executives are tied to publishing profits.[2] June 2006 - Rudy Baum writes "Take A Stand," another C&EN editorial against "socialized science." He argues, "As a member of the ACS Publications Division executive team, I am very familiar with the tremendous effort, expense, and human resources that are poured into producing the finest chemistry journals and databases in the world." As support, Rudy cites the position of the scholarly division of the Assn. of American Publishers (AAP). Rudy does not disclose that the chairman of the AAP's scholarly division is Brian Crawford, a publishing executive at ACS. ...

More on the acs campaign against oa

Mon, 29 Oct 2007 04:00:00 +0100

Yesterday I received an email from "Miss Phlogiston", another insider at the American Chemical Society. As with the original "ACS Insider" (see one, two), I know nothing about the pseudonymous author. Excerpt from her message: I am writing you this email in [alliance] with the original Insider at the American Chemical Society. The Chronicle of Higher Education confirmed last week that executive bonuses at the American Chemical Society are tied to the financial success of their publishing division. This money may be influencing opposition to Open Access publishing by ACS executives. The executive director pulls in almost $1 million annually. To prevent Open Access: ACS Editor Rudy Baum has written numerous opposing editorials in Chemical & Engineering News. The Society has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars for lobbyists. ACS Publishing Executive, Brian Crawford, helped hire a suspect PR firm which created a covert organization called Partnership for Research Integrity in Science and Medicine (PRISM). Question: Is ACS being run in the interest of members or to fatten the wallets of its executives? Please reference the following time line with supporting sources. [1] Sept 2004 - Rudy Baum writes an editorial in C&EN entitled "Socialized Science." Rudy argues, "Open access, in fact, equates with socialized science." Rudy does not mention that bonuses for ACS publishing executives are tied to publishing profits. [2] June 2006 - Rudy Baum writes "Take A Stand," another C&EN editorial against "socialized science. ...

Use prism to start a dialogue on open access, september 2007

Thu, 18 Oct 2007 12:00:00 +0100

"PRISM, an anti-open access group of the Association of American Publishers, has launched a nasty PR campaign that attempts to demonize open access publishing by using simple slogans to equate op... (Source: Info To Go: Navigating the Internet)

More negative responses to prism

Wed, 10 Oct 2007 02:21:44 +0100

The PRISM campaign, which was recently launched by The Association of American Publishers Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division (AAP PSP), continues to evoke negative responses. An online article (Scientists, publishers and authors rage against PRISM) from Information World Review reports: Well-known scientist and OA supporter Peter Murray-Rust from Cambridge [University] added to the chorus of derision for PRISM. "This initiative is an undisguised coalition to discredit OA publishing and its launch has generated universal dismay and anger in many quarters," he said. "This campaign is clearly focused on the preservation of the status quo in scholarly publishing (along with the attendant revenues), and not on ensuring that scientific research results are distributed and used as widely as possible," wrote Heather Joseph, executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition. In addition, the Library Journal notes in its newswire story (PRISM spurs another AAP PSP Executive Council resignation): Its [PRISM's] launch, however, has been met with outrage by many members of AAP, as well as OA advocates. A number of publishers have since sought to distance themselves from PRISM, including: Cambridge University Press, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, Columbia University Press, MIT Press, Nature Publishing Group, Oxford University Press, Pennsylvania State University Press, Rockefeller University Press, University of Chicago Press. Meanwhile, as OA advocate Peter Suber noted on his blog, no publishers are openly identified as members of the PRISM coalition. (Source: Transforming Scholarly Communication)

More on prism

Thu, 27 Sep 2007 04:00:00 +0100

Alexis Madrigal, Foundations of Science: Research Integrity or Publisher Profits? Wired News, September 26, 2007. Excerpt: We'd like to introduce a new regular feature here at WiSci that we're calling, The Foundations of Science (FOS). These posts will scrutinize organizations that claim the mantle of science but may or may not be scientific at all. We'll provide you with information about who funds these groups, their biases, and why they were founded to help you evaluate the claims that these thinktank-like outfits make each day in the media. Up first is the Partnership for Research Integrity in Science & Medicine (PRISM). During the past week, we've been covering the PR war between traditional science publishers and their open access counterparts. Traditional publishers created PRISM in response to potential government legislation that they think could impact their bottom-lines. Organization: Partnership for Research Integrity in Science & Medicine Acronym: PRISM The Wired Take: As a contribution to the debate about open access, PRISM is not a good resource. While it represents the polemics of one side of the debate well, it does not answer the real question we're all asking publishers: why should their traditional subscription model for scientific journals be the dominant avenue for dissemination of peer reviewed scientific research? Funded By: The Executive Council of the Professional & Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers (AAP) Council Chair: Brian D. Crawford, Senior VP, Journals Publishing Group, Publications Division, American Chemical Society Council Vice Chair: Michael Hays, Managing Director, Global Publishing McGraw-Hill Higher Education Primary Purpose: Governmental lobbying, public relations Statement to Wired: “At this time, anything we have to say is contained on the website. ...

Selected news on scholarly communications issues

Thu, 27 Sep 2007 04:00:00 +0100

Last month, in a post about BioMed Central , I said "there is growing evidence that open access articles, especially high quality open access articles, are read and cited more." It seems the truth hasn't been ascertained on this issue yet. I've seen some reports this month that show evidence that OA status may not affect impact, at least not in some disciplines: Do open access articles have greater citation impact? [abstract only available at WU] (no evidence for greater impact of OA in condence matter physics); Open Access does not increase citations for research articles from The Astrophysical Journal; The Research Impact of Open Access Journal Articles ("OA articles in Biology and Economics had the highest research impact. OA articles in hard, urban, and convergent fields such as Physics, Mathematics, and Chemical Engineering did not necessarily get cited most often"). Open access does require some effort on your part, either in selection of the journal or negotiating your rights so that you can self-archive or submit to some open repository like PubMed Central, so it would be good to know whether that is worthwhile or not. Stevan Harnad (Where There's No Access Problem There's No Open Access Advantage, Open Access Archivangelism, September 7, 2007) suggests that OA makes little difference in those disciplines where research requires huge infrastructure; researchers in those areas will be at institutions that can afford to pay for access. Alexandria Hiatt, Profs Might Make Their Articles Free, Harvard Crimson, September 27, 2007 - "the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, advanced a measure yesterday that would make articles written by Harvard professors in scholarly journals available online at no cost... ...

More on prism

Tue, 25 Sep 2007 04:00:00 +0100

Bruce Byfield, PRISM Coalition lobbies against open access, Linux.com, September 24, 2007. Excerpt: Forces are marshaling to oppose the open access movement, the open source-inspired movement to make academic research publicly available online. The American Association of Publishers (AAP) recently announced the creation of the Partnership for Research Integrity in Science and Medicine (PRISM).... "It's really designed to oppose open access with all kinds of misinformation," says Leslie Chan, a senior lecturer at the University of Toronto and one of the founding members of the open access movement. Little is known about PRISM or its supporters, aside from the fact that they are using AAP resources. Linux.com's request for an interview received a response from Sara Firestone, the director of the professional and scholarly publishing division of the AAP, asking what questions would be asked. We submitted a list of questions, but Firestone and the AAP ignored subsequent attempts at contact.... The first result of the [AAP] meeting with Dezenhall seems to have been the resistance in the last year to the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA), a bipartisan bill introduced in the United States last year. According to Chan, the AAP responded to the bill by distributing a letter to enlist the paid staffs of academic professional associations in the resistance to it. In many cases, this effort resulted in a split between the staff and boards or steering committees of professional associations. For instance, in the American Anthropological Association, the executive director endorsed the AAP letter on behalf of the association without consultation, arguing that the letter demanded an urgent response. ...

After prism, try cia

Mon, 24 Sep 2007 04:00:00 +0100

Charles W. Bailey, Jr., Here's Some Advice That Won't Cost the AAP $500K, DigitalKoans, September 23, 2007. Excerpt: After the PRISM fiasco, it may be time for the Association of American Publishers to consider a new initiative: CIA (Change Instead of Annihilation). CIA would have a single goal: to develop new business strategies so that AAP members could survive and thrive in a scholarly communication system where open access prevails. The AAP doesn't have to embrace open access to launch CIA —CIA can be a contingency plan. However, CIA will fail if its participants do not take the underlying premise that open access can succeed seriously, and CIA will require intense brainstorming that lets go of long-held beliefs about conventional publishing models.... It may sound crazy, but ask yourself this: Who do you want to be if open access gains enough momentum to trigger the collapse of conventional publishing models, the guy with a plan or the guy without a plan? It looks to me like Elsevier is starting to think outside of the box with initiatives such as OncologySTAT and Scirus, and Elsevier has always been a tough, smart competitor in the publishing marketplace. If the day of reckoning comes, how far behind Elsevier do you want to be? ... PS: Exactly. (Source: Open Access News)

Here's some advice that won't cost the aap $500k

Mon, 24 Sep 2007 04:00:00 +0100

After the PRISM fiasco, it may be time for the Association of American Publishers to consider a new initiative: CIA (Change Instead of Annihilation). CIA would have a single goal: to develop new business strategies so that AAP members could survive and thrive in a scholarly communication system where open access prevails. The AAP doesn't have to embrace open access to launch CIA—CIA can be a contingency plan. However, CIA will fail if its participants do not take the underlying premise that open access can succeed seriously, and CIA will require intense brainstorming that lets go of long-held beliefs about conventional publishing models. To that end, why not let the barbarians at the gate in and have lunch? Who better to bring fresh perspectives than open access advocates? After all, open advocates are not generally anti-publisher—they just want to change publishing models to support open access. If Elsevier, Wiley, and others can do it, so be it. It may sound crazy, but ask yourself this: Who do you want to be if open access gains enough momentum to trigger the collapse of conventional publishing models, the guy with a plan or the guy without a plan? It looks to me like Elsevier is starting to think outside of the box with initiatives such as OncologySTAT and Scirus, and Elsevier has always been a tough, smart competitor in the publishing marketplace. If the day of reckoning comes, how far behind Elsevier do you want to be? Which brings us to why the AAP may never do CIA. Having an open access plan is a competitive advantage, and publishers may not want to share that advantage. But, that doesn't mean they can't have their own internal planning process, even if it's clandestine. ...

Here's some advice that won't cost the aap $500k

Mon, 24 Sep 2007 03:32:05 +0100

Here's some advice that won't cost the aap $500k

Mon, 24 Sep 2007 03:26:56 +0100

The dezenhall proposal: what would $300k to $500k buy the aap?

Fri, 21 Sep 2007 04:11:21 +0100

The leaked text of Eric Dezenhall's anti-open-access proposal to the Association of American Publishers has been made available as part of a NewScientist article by Jim Giles, who broke the Dezenhall story in January. This is a must read for those interested in open access issues. Source: Suber Peter. "Background on the AAP Hiring of Eric Dezenhall." Open Access News, 20 September 2007. Other recent postings in the same categories:Institutional Repository Guidelines by Charles on September 17th, 2007Cut-and-Paste NIH Public Access Policy Message to Senate Updated by Charles on September 17th, 2007Contact the Senate about the NIH Public Access Policy by 9/28/07 by Charles on September 12th, 2007 (Source: DigitalKoans)

The dezenhall proposal: what would $300k to $500k buy the aap?

Fri, 21 Sep 2007 04:06:30 +0100

The leaked text of Eric Dezenhall's anti-open-access proposal to the Association of American Publishers has been made available as part of a NewScientist article by Jim Giles, who broke the Dezenhall story in January. This is a must read for those interested in open access issues. Source: Suber Peter. "Background on the AAP Hiring of Eric Dezenhall." Open Access News, 20 September 2007. Other recent postings in the same categories:Institutional Repository Guidelines by DK Administror on September 17th, 2007Cut-and-Paste NIH Public Access Policy Message to Senate Updated by DK Administror on September 17th, 2007Contact the Senate about the NIH Public Access Policy by 9/28/07 by DK Administror on September 12th, 2007 (Source: DigitalKoans)

The open access debate revisited

Fri, 21 Sep 2007 04:00:00 +0100

I have always worried about the logic behind the push for open access repositories, while supporting the principle. Clearly, it is desirable to have access to scholarly literature either free or at a reasonable price, and clearly this can be achieved through institutional or subject repositories. Less clear is whether this will bring down (as has been suggested in the past) the price of journals, or whether these repositories are, or will become, a useful and seriously-used resource.My worries centred (and centre) on version control and authority - the two fundamental and incontrovertible benefits of formal, journal-based, scholarly publishing. To have an article published in a peer-review and possibly ISI-badged journal is to mark it as worthy, meritorious and accepted by the author's peers; at the same time, it becomes - without question - the copy of record: it IS the published version, and thus the version to which others refer and which they cite. Because multiple versions can be deposited in multiple repositories, open access poses problems; the publisher's imprimatur is missing - or at least, obscure. Clearly, as repositories bed down, these issues can be assessed and dealt with, and the JISC already have underway a project to examine the issues around version control, although if the methodology posted on the JISC website is the result, it is too simplistic.DigitalKoans reported that The leaked text of Eric Dezenhall's anti-open-access proposal to the Association of American Publishers has been made available as part of a NewScientist article by Jim Giles, who broke the Dezenhall story in January. ... and it is not surprising that he makes the same points, I suppose - the publishing industry genuinely adds value in the production of scientific journals; "peer-reviewed journals are the only reliable source for sound science. ...

Prism: not ready for peer review

Tue, 18 Sep 2007 04:26:00 +0100

According to Peter Suber on Open Access News, PRISM, the latest anti-OA lobbying campaign launched by a branch of the Professional and Society Publishers (PSP) branch of the Association of American Publishers, has made some changes to their website. No wonder! This is a grassroots campaign that isn't exactly taking off. The "About PRISM" page says who PRISM was established by, but lists no specific endorsements. This is in contrast, of course, to the numerous public non-endorsements and statements of non-affiliation, including:the request by Rockfeller University Press publicly asking for a disclaimer on the PRISM website saying that this does not reflect the views of all AAP members, including Rockefeller; Cambridge University Press's Stephen Bourne wrote: heard about PRISM launch for the first time last week, from which you will understand that Cambridge University Press has in no way been involved in, or consulted on, the PRISM initiative (thanks to Peter Murray-Rust).one of the authors whose work was cited on the original site post, Rick Anderson publicly stated his Nonaffliation with PRISM, a message that received a reply from the President of the American Association of University Presses, Sandy Thatcher, who stated that "Interestingly, PRISM does NOT link to my paper in Learned Publishing on open access or to the AAUP Statement on Open Access of which my paper is an expansion. Therein lies a mystery.... (especially since Penn State is a member of PSP, though I do not endorse everything that PSP initiates, including PRISM). From: Liblicense.Will there be a mad rush to endorse the newly revised PRISM site? Hmmm, let's see:From the PRISM welcome page:PRISM expresses concerns about the unintended consequences of unfunded government mandatesAny publisher that signs on to this one is biting the hand that feeds them!. ...

Publishers' anti-public access campaign backfired

Sat, 15 Sep 2007 02:26:12 +0100

A recent public relations campaign (PRISM), which was sponsored by the Association of American Publishers, argued against public access to the findings of federally funded research. In response, the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has issued a statement that sets the record straight: About peer review The peer review system is rightly seen as the central contribution journals have made to science, however neither public access policies to federally funded research or open access journals alter the traditional practice of peer review. About government censorship Current NIH policy (http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-05-022.html) calls for authors to deposit their versions of articles in PubMed Central. These articles will be freely accessible unless temporarily embargoed for up to one year by their authors. This policy in no way affects the published versions of articles that are held in libraries.About publishers' intellectual property NIH’s public access policy calls for authors to deposit the final electronic manuscript after peer review and acceptance for publication. Authors deposit works and may set an embargo period that can serve to protect publisher revenues. However, no proposal has been made either to force publishers to deposit their own published versions of articles or to deposit works that they have published in the past. No existing or proposed policy has extended beyond authors’ works that are directly funded in some way with government dollars.In July, ARL and the American Library Association jointly issued a statement that explained why mandatory public access to federally funded research does not violate copyright obligations. There have been reports that the publishers' campaign has drawn a great deal of criticism. ...

More on the arl critique of prism

Thu, 13 Sep 2007 04:00:00 +0100

Andrew Albanese, ARL Challenges Publishers' PR Campaign Against Open Access Legislation, Library Journal, September 12, 2007. Excerpt: The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has issued a statement criticizing a new initiative in what it called an "ongoing PR campaign" against public access legislation, supported by the Association of American Publishers (AAP). ARL officials said the latest effort, dubbed PRISM (Partnership for Research Integrity in Science & Medicine), "frequently distorts the nature of ongoing and substantive discussions about open access and public access to federally funded research." The PRISM web site argues that public access efforts will undermine peer review and harm journal publishers; will open the door to "scientific censorship in the form of selective additions to or omissions from the scientific record"; subject the scientific record to "the uncertainty that comes with changing federal budget priorities and bureaucratic meddling"; and will introduce "duplication and inefficiencies that will divert resources that would otherwise be dedicated to research." ARL officials noted that the PRISM arguments closely follow the advice of PR "pit bull" Eric Dezenhall, whom publishers consulted in the last year to develop a strategy for fighting public access legislation. Nature first reported publishers' plans to launch their PR campaign in January of 2007. ARL officials said the PR campaign offers libraries and researchers an opportunity to engage the campus community "concerning the changes to the scholarly communication" and provides a memo with talking points it hopes will help guide that discussion. OA public access supporters have already hit the blogs, both dissecting PRISM's arguments and expressing their displeasure over the coalition's tactics. (Source: Open Access News)

Open access news substitute

Wed, 12 Sep 2007 15:44:00 +0100

There is a problem with FTP'ing to the Open Access News site. Peter Suber is temporarily posting to the SPARC Open Access Forum instead.Here are the two most recent posts:Here's another installment of the email version of Open Access News, since I still can't update the blog < http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html >. Feel free to forward this widely, especially to people who might not know that OAN is temporarily frozen.Items are roughly in the order in which I discovered them, with the most recent at the top the order in which they would have appeared on the blog. Peter SuberPermission to harvest data from online filesPeter Murray-Rust, Nature: How much content can our robots access? A Scientist and the Web, September 12, 2007. Excerpt: In this blog (Copyrighted Data: replies [1], Wiley and eMolecules: unacceptable; an explanation would be welcome - [2]) , and elsewhere we have been discussing the “copyright” of factual information, or “data”. In [2] I ask a major publisher whether copyright applies to some or all of the factual scientific record they publish. So far I have had no reply. Here I ask another, Nature, who - at least through Timo Hannay - have been very helpful in discussing aspects of publication (most other publishers have been silent). The issue arises in “supplemental data” or “supporting information” which is the factual record of the experiment - increasingly required as proof of correctness. Some major publishers (Royal Soc Chemistry, Int. Union of Crystallography, Nature) do not claim copyright over this; others such as American Chemical Society and Angewandte Chemie (Wiley) appear to do so, though I haven’t had a definitive public statement from either. Our vision for the future is that a large part of published scientific data could be made directly machine-understandable, if the publishers collaborate in this.... So I am going to ask Nature what I can do and what I can’t. ...

Campaign against open access and public access to federally funded research

Wed, 12 Sep 2007 15:19:24 +0100

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) this week issued a statement criticizing a new initiative in what it called an “ongoing PR campaign” against public access legislation, supported by the Association of American Publishers (AAP). ARL officials said the latest effort, dubbed PRISM (Partnership for Research Integrity in Science & Medicine), “frequently distorts the nature of ongoing and substantive discussions about open access and public access to federally funded research.” The PRISM web site argues that public access efforts will undermine peer review and harm journal publishers; will open the door to “scientific censorship in the form of selective additions to or omissions from the scientific record”; subject the scientific record to “the uncertainty that comes with changing federal budget priorities and bureaucratic meddling”; and will introduce “duplication and inefficiencies that will divert resources that would otherwise be dedicated to research.” ARL officials noted that the PRISM arguments closely follow the advice of PR “pit bull” Eric Dezenhall, whom publishers consulted in the last year to develop a strategy for fighting public access legislation. Nature first reported publishers’ plans to launch their PR campaign in January of 2007. ARL officials said the PR campaign offers libraries and researchers an opportunity to engage the campus community “concerning the changes to the scholarly communication” and provides a memo with talking points it hopes will help guide that discussion. OA public access supporters have already hit the blogs, both dissecting PRISM’s arguments and expressing their displeasure over the coalition’s tactics. ...

Project of publishers’ association is criticized by some of its members and open-access advocates

Wed, 12 Sep 2007 14:28:20 +0100

Read the full story in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The Association of American Publishers has landed in hot water with university presses and research librarians, as well as open-access advocates, thanks to a new undertaking that is billed as an attempt to “safeguard the scientific and medical peer-review process and educate the public about the risks of proposed government interference with the scholarly communication process.” That effort, known as the Partnership for Research Integrity in Science & Medicine, or Prism, is the latest twist in a continuing public-relations war between the association and the open-access camp. (Source: Environmental News Bits)

More on prism

Wed, 12 Sep 2007 04:00:00 +0100

Dana Blankenhorn, Publisher war against open access, Open Source (a ZDNet blog), September 12, 2007. The first freedom in open source is access. But access threatens business models, so when publishers felt the heat of open source advocates, they did what any other business would do. They launched a PR War. Its aim is to stop a requirement that research funded by the NIH be placed on the agency’s PubMed Central within 12 months of publication. The House has passed it in the new budget, the Senate is considering it. Getting research onto the Web would end the publishers’ current exclusive on older research, and would cost them money. So the Association of American Publishers have launched a Web site, PRISM, which aims to convince lawmakers that “Public access equals government censorship.” It’s the product of Eric Dezenhall.... The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that the Association of Research Libraries has gotten angry enough to send its members a PDF ”talking points memo” calling the AAP’s rhetoric inaccurate.... Peter Suber, the open access project director at Public Knowledge, has covered PRISM and the backlash against it on his blog. He says [PRISM's] lobbying is more of a threat to open access than the message put out by PRISM. In the past, questions of academic publishing were elite topics argued mainly among elites. With PRISM, the publishing industry has broken out of this frame, targeting politicians and the public. Without some serious pushback the first essential of open source could easily be lost. (Source: Open Access News)

Some copyright issues

Tue, 11 Sep 2007 23:24:51 +0100

Open Access is a big deal to librarians. Or at least it should be. It’s all about getting free and open access to scholarly literature. Many publishers are against this because it will mean they’ll lose money. They cover their greed, though, by invoking ideas of authority, quality, and the need for peer reviews. While those are important concepts, they’re a distraction from the main idea here, that scholarly research needs to be shared and not hidden in journals whose prices go up an average of 18% EVERY YEAR! Today I read an excellent blog post on the ACRLog, written by Marc Meola. It’s about PRISM, an activist group that’s a part of the Association of American Publishers and which is against open access. The post is called “Use PRISM To Start A Dialogue On Open Access.” This post isn’t terribly long and it’s full of great links, so please click and give it a read. Another good article was posted today in the Chronicle of Higher Education and is called “Playing Craps with Copyright?“. It continues the discussion about the copyright issues that Google’s book digitization project has stirred up. Also has good links. (Source: BiblioTech Web)

More on prism

Tue, 11 Sep 2007 04:00:00 +0100

Jennifer Howard, Project of Publishers' Association Is Criticized by Some of Its Members and Open-Access Advocates, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 11, 2007 (accessible only to subscribers). Excerpt: The Association of American Publishers has landed in hot water with university presses and research librarians, as well as open-access advocates, thanks to a new undertaking that is billed as an attempt to "safeguard the scientific and medical peer-review process and educate the public about the risks of proposed government interference with the scholarly communication process." That effort, known as the Partnership for Research Integrity in Science & Medicine, or Prism, is the latest twist in a continuing public-relations war between the association and the open-access camp. In January, the association created a ruckus by hiring Eric Dezenhall, a high-powered media consultant described by the journal Nature as a "pit bull" (The Chronicle, January 26). Mr. Dezenhall's advice to the publishers' association, says Nature, included a suggestion that it focus on messages such as "Public access equals government censorship." ... Prism arrives as the U.S. Senate prepares to consider a spending bill for the National Institutes of Health that would require research supported by the agency to be made publicly available.... Reactions to Prism have been widespread and vigorous, with some commentators calling for a boycott of the association. The news provoked one university-press director, Mike Rossner of Rockefeller University Press, to make a public request that a disclaimer be placed on the Prism Web site "indicating that the views presented on the site do not necessarily represent those of all members of the AAP." Mr. ...

Michael geist on the cihr oa mandate

Tue, 11 Sep 2007 04:00:00 +0100

Michael Geist, New research policy a victory for 'open access', Tonto Star, September 10, 2007. Excerpt: ...The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the federal government's health research granting agency, unveiled a new open access policy for the research that it funds. The new policy – the first of its kind for Ottawa's three major research granting institutions that dole out hundreds of millions of dollars each year – will revolutionize access to health research by mandating that thousands of articles published each year be made freely available online to a global audience. This marks an important step in the "open access" movement in Canada, which had been falling behind peer institutions in the United States, Europe and Australia. It also places heightened pressure on the publishing industry to adapt their policies to permit greater access to publicly funded research.... Notwithstanding this important development, the publishing industry remains skeptical about open access. Last month, the Association of American Publishers launched PRISM, a lobbying effort geared toward convincing U.S. lawmakers that open access threatens independent research and smacks of government censorship. While such outlandish claims are easily countered, the lobby has forced the scientific community to spend more of its time justifying policies to make their research available, rather than focusing on the research itself. Indeed, critics have noted the publisher pressure may have led to a last-minute change in the CIHR policy. The policy is not iron-clad since publication in an online repository is conditional on permission from the publisher.... ...

Use prism to start a dialogue on open access

Mon, 10 Sep 2007 15:40:03 +0100

In a previous post I argued that developing free and open source library systems should be an ethical issue for academic librarians. Promoting open access to scholarly literature is the other ethical issue we face. PRISM, an anti-open access group of the Association of American Publishers, has launched a nasty PR campaign that attempts to demonize open access publishing by using simple slogans to equate open access with lack of peer review, government censorship, and theft of intellectual property. (I know, it’s funny, but they are actually saying this stuff. Good thing librarians know how to evaluate information, right?) As noted in the SPARC letter to members, the launch of this initiative provides a timely opportunity for engaging faculty members, researchers, students and administrators in dialogue on important issues in scholarly communications. Exactly. This is the perfect time to initiate or re-initiate a campus-wide committee on scholarly communication on your campus, start a committee at your local ACRL chapter or statewide consortium, or host a lecture or forum on open access. Most encouragingly, the Association of Research Libraries has produced an excellent issue brief with talking points that effectively counter the PRISM propaganda. ARL points out: On peer review- The peer review system, based almost completely on the voluntary free labor of the research community, is independent of a particular mode of publishing or business model. On intellectual property- Researchers themselves write and peer review the articles without receiving any payment from publishers. The federal government provides substantial public funding for scientific research. Existing and proposed policies concerning public access to federally funded research attempt to create balance between the contributions made and benefits received by publishers and allow them to continue to profit tremendously from the pool of content this funded research generates. ...

Prism under fire

Fri, 07 Sep 2007 16:18:44 +0100

Nur mal kurz zur Info, weil es ein wichtiger Teil der ongoing Open Access Debatte ist und zur Zeit in den Staaten für viel böses Blut sorgt: Die AAP (Association of American Publishers) hat eine Initiative PRISM (Partnership for Research Integrity in Science and Medicine) gegründet, die mit falschen Behauptungen und Lügen nur so um sich zu werfen scheint, mit dem Resultat, dass sich AAP-Mitglieder wie OUP (und andere werden folgen) anfangen, sich von dieser Pitbull-Lobbyinginitiative zu distanzieren, Wissenschaftler mit dem Verweis auf Goebbelsche Propaganda ihre Editorenschaft hinwerfen oder Experten wie Alma Swan ihre Häme (und Sorge) ausschütten: Pat Schroeder [President AAP], quoted on the PRISM website says: We want to share as much scientific and medical information as possible with the entire world. Thats why we got into this business in the first place. No, maam. Your business works by restricting access to the information you have in your grasp. Brian Vickery von BioMed Central: What PRISM truly represents is an entrenched industry still attempting to hold at bay the disruptive effect of 21st Century communications. In the same way that the music industry was forced to adapt to iTunes, and cinema and television had no choice but to use sites like YouTube to their advantage, so will the scientific publishing industry have to eventually determine a way to use todays technology to its advantage. Anything less than a commitment to this principle is to the detriment of scientific discovery and the global public, which stands to benefit enormously from greater access to publicly-funded research. Die Kreativität bei der Bespöttelung kennt keine Grenzen, hier ein “Trittbrettfahrer”: The present website was developed to counter the myths being propagated by OA proponents, most of whom are bloggers of low repute. ...

More on the ups behind the aap / dezenhall campaign

Tue, 04 Sep 2007 16:55:54 +0100

In a letter explaining his resignation from the editorial board of the International Journal of Information Management, Tom Wilson writes: This feeling [of the existence of a conflict of interest] was strengthened by the recent announcement of the lobby group PRISM, established, as I understand by the commercial publishers as an attempt to discredit the open access mode of publishing. It is worth repeating that commercial publishers are not the only ones behind PRISM. The "About Us" section of the PRISM site states: The Partnership for Research Integrity in Science and Medicine--the PRISM Coalition--was established by The Executive Council of the Professional & Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers... The Executive Council includes representatives of Columbia University Press, MIT Press and the University of Chicago Press. I believe all three have 501(c) status. Below are links to the latest 990s I found using the Foundation Center's 990 Finder: Columbia University Press MIT (MIT Press LTD in London is not exempt, but MIT Press in Cambridge appears to use the same EIN [04-2103594] as MIT. See the bottom of this PDF, for example.) University of Chicago (see p. 15 of the PDF for info. on the press) (Source: Library Blog Collection - Georgia State University Library)

More on prism

Tue, 04 Sep 2007 04:00:00 +0100

Here are a few more recent observations from around the web. From David Sewell in a comment at Effect Measure: I'm part of a university press, though not one that's an AAP-PSP member. The other day I posted a negative reaction to the PRISM website on the main email list used by the North American university press community and can confirm based on offline responses I got that I'm not alone in being upset. The fact is that the PRISM lobbying effort was authorized by a majority decision of an executive council consisting of a small subset of all the publishers who are AAP members. Mike Rossner's request for a disclaimer is reasonable. It should be supplemented by an opt-in list of individuals and organizations who explicitly identify themselves as PRISM Coalition members. (Though I realize that the basic principle of astroturfing is to make it seem like your base is far larger than it actually is.) From John Inglis in a comment at Tree of Life: I'd like to make it clear that membership in AAP does not imply or require endorsement of the arguments made by PRISM. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press is currently a member of AAP but our access policies are our own. We were not involved in the formation of PRISM and do not support many of the statements being made on its behalf. From Kevin Smith at Duke Scholarly Communications: ...Equally simple-minded is the new campaign (PRISM) launched by the American Association of Publishers against public access for federally-funded research in health. The publishing industry lost in Congress earlier this year, when a mandate for public access to research funded by the National Institute of Health was included in an appropriations bill. Now they hope to reverse that loss by convincing the public that mandated access for taxpayers is “government interference. ...

Prism controversy recap

Sun, 02 Sep 2007 23:27:18 +0100

While the Association of American Publishers' Partnership for Research Integrity in Science and Medicine (PRISM) initiative didn't get a warm welcome from library and open access bloggers, it certainly got a heated one. Peter Suber has pointed out a few of the more incisive responses: "Andrew Leonard on PRISM," "Has PRISM Violated Copyright?," "John Blossom on PRISM," "More Comments on PRISM [1]," "More Comments on PRISM [2]," "More on PRISM [1]," "More on PRISM [2]," "More on PRISM [3]," "More on PRISM [4]," "Much More on PRISM," and "Stevan Harnad on PRISM." As usual, Suber's own analysis is one of the most cogent: "Publishers Launch an Anti-OA Lobbying Organization." Matt Hodgkinson's post, "PRISM Are Scum," offers another link roundup. Rick Anderson, a frequent critic of the open access movement, disclaimed any affiliation with PRISM in a 8/30/07 liblicense-l message after the organization included his "Open Access: Clear Benefits, Hidden Costs" paper in its In the News: Articles page. Jonathan A. Eisen, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California at Davis, said the following in his "Calling for a Boycott of AAP—Association of American Publishers" posting: I think academics and the public need to fight back against this attempt to mislead the public about the issues surrounding Open Access publishing. And one way to fight back is to recommend that the members of AAP drop out or request termination of the PRISM effort. So here is a list (see below for the full list) with links of the members of AAP. ...

Prism controversy recap

Sun, 02 Sep 2007 04:00:00 +0100

The partnership for research integrity in science & medicine (prism)

Thu, 30 Aug 2007 13:56:54 +0100

"The Association of American Publishers has just launched "PRISM" (Partnership for Research Integrity in Science & Medicine). PRISM is an anti-OA lobbying organization, to counteract the accelerating growth of OA and the dramatic success of the pro-OA Alliance for Taxpayer Access (ATA) lobbying organization in the US and the EC Open Access Petition in Europe" (Source: Peter Scott's Library Blog)

John blossom on prism

Thu, 30 Aug 2007 04:00:00 +0100

John Blossom, PRISM Promotes the Interests of Scientific Publishers: Is it Better to Lobby or to Change? ContentBlogger, August 29, 2007. Excerpt: Wired Science has the most in-your-face coverage of the formation of PRISM, an advocacy group formed by scholarly publishers to stem the legislative movement towards free access to government-funded scholarly research. This in and of itself is not a surprise, but Wired claims that the site is an example of astroturf advocacy, meaning an organization that tries to position itself as a grass-roots movement when in fact it is created by others wanting to appear to have grass roots support. PRISM is the creation of the Association of American Publishers, so one assumes that the roots of this organization are more likely to grow in the yards of scholarly publishers than the scientists providing the research.... The primary problem with PRISM is that it seems to be advocating on a range of issues which, while valid in their own right, are more about fear, uncertainty and doubt - those familiar sales tools - than the real issues at hand.... [The claim that OA will undermine peer review] seems to be somewhat disingenuous, in that there may be alternative methods for supporting effective peer review that have not been explored by scientific publishers. Certainly a government-mandated publishing of research for free that doesn't take into account how that research is produced has the potential to be an unfunded mandate that could place an undue burden on scientific publishers. This is a real issue, but the answers to the issue may not lie with the government itself - they may lie with addressing how the peer review process is funded in general.... Surely politics should stay out of science, but there's no indication at this time that the government would have the ability to influence the peer review process politically through these proposed [OA] mandates any more than it does today.... ...

Article in salon on oa

Wed, 29 Aug 2007 16:50:00 +0100

Andrew Leonard writes a great column in Salon.com on "How the world works". Today there was this:Science publishers get even stupider For fans of increased public access to taxpayer-funded scientific research, 2007 got off to an eye-opening start when Nature broke the news in January that Eric Dezenhall, a public relations high flier, was advising a group of scientific publishers to start pushing the theme that "public access equals government censorship." I had some fun with that tidbit: "... any publisher of scientific research who even begins to entertain the notion that free access to scientific information can or should be equated with government censorship should be mocked mercilessly in every publication, online or off, free or subscription required, evanescent as a blog or solid as a hard-copy Encyclopedia Britannica, from now until they beg forgiveness from every human on this planet for their disingenuous mendacity." A few days later I was similarly unkind while reviewing Dezenhall's book "Damage Control." Despite my rhetoric, I can't say I actually believed that the publishers would take Dezenhall's advice. But that is exactly what has happened, reports Peter Suber, the author of a blog exquisitely focused on the topic of open access. On Aug. 23, the Association of American Publishers announced that it was forming a lobbying organization, the Partnership for Research Integrity in Science and Medicine (PRISM), to fight back against the perfidious influence of the open access revolutionaries. A specter is haunting commercial science publishers: Policies are being proposed that threaten to introduce undue government intervention in science and scholarly publishing, putting at risk the integrity of scientific research by ... ...

More on the aap / dezenhall media messaging campaign

Wed, 29 Aug 2007 14:22:03 +0100

Andrew Leonard's "Science publishers get even stupider" was posted to Salon yesterday. After citing Peter Suber's "demolition of PRISM's press release," he writes: The American Association of Publishers and everyone associated with it should be ashamed of trying to protect their profit margins by slandering the open access movement as government intervention and censorship. If you read the column, make sure you take you take a few minutes to browse the comments. I was particularly struck by this one. It's a shame it was made pseudonymously. (Source: Library Blog Collection - Georgia State University Library)