Re: Five Universities Sign Open Access Funding Compact

[Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu>]

I applaud these five universities for putting their money where 
their mouth is. This will help obviate one of the perils of the 
Green OA system that Stevan Harnad advocates, viz., the 
proliferation of different versions of articles as publishers 
allow peer-reviewed but unedited articles to be posted while 
reserving the right to distribute the final versions themselves 
exclusively.

But by all rights OA should apply to monographs, too. It makes no 
intellectual sense to isolate book-length works in print form in 
a few hundred libraries while making journal literature on the 
same subjects accessible worldwide for free. So, when will these 
universities, and others, step up to the plate and pay author 
fees for monographs, too?

Sandy Thatcher
Penn State Press


>" . . .five schools at the forefront of the open access debate --
>Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, MIT,
>and UC Berkeley -- have announced their joint support for 'A
>Compact on Open-Access Publishing.' The release accompanying the
>Compact touts the economic advantages of a robust author-pays
>option for scholarly publishing, and urges the academic community
>to step up university-wide efforts to make the author-pays model
>more viable."
>
>http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6696797.html
>
>Bernie Sloan


-- 
Sanford G. Thatcher
Executive Editor for Social Sciences and Humanities
Penn State University Press
8201 Edgewater Drive
Frisco, TX  75034-5514
e-mail: sgt3@psu.edu
Phone: (214) 705-9010
http://www.psupress.org

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who can write know anything."-Walter Bagehot (1853)