Libraries Defend Open Access

aisaac writes "Earlier this year an article in Nature (PDF, subscription required) exposed publishers' plans to equate public access to federally funded research with government censorship and the destruction of peer review. In an open letter last month, Rockefeller University Press castigated the publishers' sock-puppet outfit, PRISM, for using distorting rhetoric in a coordinated PR attack on open access. Now the Association of Research Libraries has released an Issue Brief addressing this PR campaign in more detail. The Issue Brief exposes some of the distortions used to persuade key policy makers that recent gains made by open access scientific publishing pose a danger to peer reviewed scientific research, free markets, and possibly the future of western civilization. As an example of what the publishers backing PRISM hate, consider the wonderfully successful grants policy of the National Institutes of Health, which requires papers based on grant-funded research to be published in PubMed Central."

Comments

say what?

[Doppler00]

Is it just me, or am I the only one that read that description and have no idea what the issue is or what it's about? Can someone please re-word it?

Re:say what?

[Anonymous Coward]

... You clearly don't have any personal experience with the scientific process. The market does not and will not fund the most valuable research for society. The most valuable research for society comes in two types. First there is pure research which leads to profound advancements many years down the line. There is no money to be made from this, so the market would never touch it. Yet everyone involved in science knows that this type of research has the most long-lasting implications.

Second there are aspects of applied research which do not manifest in a product, but instead teach society something. For example, if several studies are conducted to determine whether or not simple vitamins can treat a serious disease, then the result may be a profound and inexpensive treatment. The market, however, will never fund this because the result of the research is not a marketable product.

Suggesting that the market will somehow fund research when most research of value produces no marketable products is naive at best. Instead, society should be funding far more research than it currently is through governmental means, and I wager it will be funding quite a bit more research as the state of society continues to advance.

Re:say what?

[stranger_to_himself]

The current model for the dissemination of scientific research is that scientists send letters and papers to journals, which are then peer assessed by reviewers assigned by the journal and, if they meet a certain standard, are printed. Journals used to be printed and sent to subscribers, and nobody complained that they had to pay to receive a copy of the journal.

Now journals can put papers online for their subscribers instead of printing, which makes people wonder exactly what the publishers are doing for the money they expect to get. They don't write the articles or pay the authors, and they don't review them or pay the reviewers (I write and review pretty regularly). But this remains the only accepted way to release your research, to appear in a well respected journal. The journals are now trading purely on reputations they have aquired for the standards of the work they accept.

Public Library of Science, as I understand it, is an online repository of research that is open to everybody. There are also several PLoS journals, that appear online and for free and perform most of the functions of the old paper journals and their online equivilants. PLoS is also gaining a good reputation for quality.

Traditional publishers are in trouble because of this, and will inevitably make some rather desperate arguments to preserve their business models, hence the article.

Re:say what?

[speaker of the truth]

The free market has spoken and it says it wants government funds. Oh I'm sorry, you don't want it to be THAT free, do you?

Re:say what?

[MrHanky]

Or perhaps children shouldn't read Ayn Rand before they know the difference between fiction and real life.