Re: Open access: a must for Wellcome Trust researchers

["Joseph J. Esposito" <espositoj@gmail.com>]

My reading of the Wellcome Trust notice is that it is prospective and thus
is unlikely (not impossible, but unlikely) to cause an author to breach a
contract.  I also doubt that the Trust would dream of having someone
breach a contract.  I suspect that there was a simple error on this point
in an earlier posting.

Surely it is within bounds for a funding body to stipulate to recipients
how the funds are to be used.  If one of the stipulations is to upload a
copy of an article to a repository, so be it; if one of the stipulations
is to insert a hardcopy into a waterproof canister and to tie the canister
to the back of a dolphin, thereby abetting global dissemination, well, so
be it.  He who pays the piper calls the tune.

Having a right and the wisdom in exercising it are two different things.  
As the dolphins of Open Access swim the seas, we should expect to see
little change in the publishing environment in the short term.  In the
middle term, as the amount of OA content grows, we will see the
availability of OA articles influence decisions to cancel certain
subscriptions (why pay for what you can get free?--and, I insist, contrary
to the assumption of so many OA advocates, librarians are not stupid),
starting with third-tier journals and moving inexorably into second-tier
ones.  (I doubt the first tier have anything to fear for quite a while.)  
In a declining market, less capital will be invested in new journals and
the appetite to underwrite peer review will diminish.  With fewer formal
channels available to publish research, research which will continue to
grow year by year, more researchers will publish informally, with little
or no formal peer review process.  This will result in a mass of research
literature findable by Google, and it will initiate new forms of
post-publication (more properly, "post-posting") peer review.  There will
be new costs attendant to this, and entrepreneurs will identify ways to
serve this evolving market.  They always do.

What OA leads to, then, is the deterioration of the legacy publishing
industry, the growth of unsifted materials on the Net, the
disintermediation of libraries (via Google et al), and a suite of new
business opportunities.  Will the world be better or worse?  Perhaps
neither.  True advances--electricity, antibiotics--are few and far
between.  OA is not in this category.  It is simply a siphoning-off of
capital that could be more usefully invested elsewhere.

Joe Esposito

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Kiley ,Mr Robert" <r.kiley@wellcome.ac.uk>
To: "David Goodman" <David.Goodman@liu.edu>; <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>; 
<liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, October 04, 2005 3:58 AM
Subject: RE: Open access: a must for Wellcome Trust researchers

> Re: Sally's comment that the Wellcome Trust "appears to be inciting (nay,
> forcing) its researchers to breach the terms of the contracts some of them
> they may have signed with publishers."
>
> The simple fact is that the Trust's grant conditions apply to researchers
> and their institutions long before any subsequent decisions are taken
> about where to publish the results or what the copyright arrangements for
> publication may be.  It is not possible to breach the terms of contracts
> that do not yet exist: in what way, therefore, is the Trust forcing its
> researchers to breach copyright agreements?
>
> Robert Kiley
>
> Head of Systems Strategy & Acting Librarian
> Wellcome Library.
> 210, Euston Road, London. NW1 2BE
> Tel: 020 7611 8338; Fax: 020 7611 8726; mailto:r.kiley@wellcome.ac.uk
> Library Web site: http://library.wellcome.ac.uk