Re: Stop fighting the inevitable - and free funds for openaccess!

[Stevan Harnad <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk>]

     OA IS NOT ABOUT FREEING FUNDS (FOR OA PUBLISHING)
     IT IS ABOUT FREEING RESEARCH FINDINGS, FOR RESEARCHERS

Some well-meaning OA advocates are again promulgating nonsense, 
as usual. What is inevitable (and optimal) is freeing research, 
not funds!

OA is not about funding OA (Gold) publishing (nor about 
publishing itself, particularly).

It is about researchers providing online access to their 
peer-reviewed findings for those researchers webwide who cannot 
afford paid access.

OA can and will be provided by researcher self-archiving (Green), 
mandated by the research community, by and for itself. The 
outcome will (easily and naturally) be adapted to by publishing, 
if need be. The rest is all idle, pre-emptive speculation, aired 
ad nauseam for years now, with no new arguments or evidence.

The publishing community has next to nothing to do with the 
immediate reachability of OA by and for the research community 
(although publishers' blessing -- by going Green -- is of course 
always welcome: all APS journals are Green; possibly all AIP 
journals?); and of course the increasingly desperate (and 
disreputable) lobbying by some publishers against Green OA 
mandates will not only fail, but will leave their proponents with 
egg on their face (openly) as in the current, silly, "Pit-Bull" 
furor...

Stevan Harnad

On Fri, 26 Jan 2007, Marc Brodsky wrote:

> There seems to be some misunderstanding of publisher positions on
> open access. Many publishers are trying, even embracing real open
> access options for authors within the environment of high
> quality, highly read journals. For example, we at the American
> Institute of Physics offer Author Select, an open access option,
> for all our journals. We even lowered fees last this year
> crossing below the raised fees of some ardent OA advocates.
>
> The real issue is whether governments should create unfunded
> mandates that force business models such as 6 or 12 month limits
> on those who have a different publishing model.
>
> Let the market, not the government, decide what authors and
> readers want and need. Once the government decides, if things do
> not work out, we are really stuck.
>
> Marc