Re: Open access: a must for Wellcome Trust researchers

["Sally Morris \(ALPSP\)" <sally.morris@alpsp.org>]

Yes, the statement on the website says it's prospective.  Unfortunately
that is not what their message to existing grant recipients says

Sally

Sally Morris, Chief Executive
Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers
Email:  sally.morris@alpsp.org

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Joseph J. Esposito" <espositoj@gmail.com>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, October 05, 2005 1:55 PM
Subject: Re: Open access: a must for Wellcome Trust researchers

> 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