AAU misinterprets House Appropriations Committee Recommendation

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

In the AAU CFR Weekly Wrap-Up

    "The House Appropriations Committee 
    Enters Scholarly Publishing Fray"
    http://aau.edu/publications/WR7.30.04.pdf

concerning the House Committee recommendation to mandate the
self-archiving of NIH-funded research articles within 6 months of
publication:

    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3851.html
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3854.html

the Association of American Universities writes the following:

    "AAU Position on Labor/ HHS/ Ed Report Language 

    "AAU has not taken a position on the substance of the proposal
    contained in the report language, but the association believes that
    a congressional prescription for scholarly publishing is unwise
    and unwarranted. However the debate over public access is decided,
    the quality and reliability of scholarly publishing should remain the
    first priority. A congressional mandate requiring a specific business
    model for the scholarly publishing enterprise prejudges what should be
    an internal, transparent deliberation by the academic and scientific
    communities. That process should examine the full range of options
    for controlling costs and increasing access to scholarly publishing
    while preserving its quality and reliability. Publishers are exploring
    different options, and outside groups or the government -- no matter
    how well intended -- should not prematurely pick winners and losers."

The AAU does not appear to have understood the substance of the House
Appropriations Committee proposal. It is not a congressional prescription
for scholarly publishing, nor a congressional mandate requiring a specific
business model. It is merely one (additional) condition on receiving NIH
research funding:

It is already mandated that funded research findings must be published in
a peer-reviewed journal, not just put in a desk-drawer ("publish or
perish"). The House Comittee's recommended new funding-agency condition is
simply that user-access to those published journal articles must be
maximised by also self-archiving them in Open Access Archives. (The UK
Parliamentary Science and Technology Comittee has just made essentially
the same recommendation.)

This misinterpretation by AAU is yet another symptom of the widespread
conflation of (1) the library serials crisis and journal affordability
problem with (2) the research access/impact problem. They are not the same
problem, and the solution to the one is not a solution to the other.
http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/accessdebate/21.html

Open Access (OA) does not equal OA Publishing, and OA provision strategies
need not be publishing reform strategies. In particular, the "green" road
to OA -- the author-institution self-archiving of their own (non-OA
journal) article out put in OA Archives -- which is what Congress is
proposing to mandate, is not a publishing reform strategy. It is an access
maximization strategy (just as the mandate to publish itself is).

Stevan Harnad