From: Richard Poynder <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Sat, 13 Jul 2013 15:26:19 +0100

The fourth Q&A in a series exploring the current state of Open Access
has been published. On this occasion the questions are answered by
Heather Joseph.

A former journal publisher, Joseph has in her time worked for both
Elsevier and the American Society for Cell Biology. In 2005, however,
she changed direction and became Executive Director for the Scholarly
Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), an alliance of
academic and research libraries created in 1998 by the Association of
Research Libraries. SPARC’s original mission was to “use libraries’
buying power to nurture the creation of high-quality, low-priced
publication outlets for peer-reviewed scientific, technical, and
medical research.”

Subsequently SPARC also changed direction, becoming an OA advocacy
group. And under Joseph’s able leadership SPARC has proved extremely
effective at making the case for OA, and persuading researchers,
institutions, funders and governments to embrace OA. In particular,
Joseph led SPARC’s efforts to secure the US National Institutes of
Health. Public Access Policy, and the recent White House Directive on
Public Access to the Results of Publicly Funded Research.

In May last year, for instance, Joseph — along with OA advocates John
Wilbanks and Michael Carroll, and publisher Mike Rossner — met with
John Holdren and Mike Stebbins of the US Office of Science and
Technology Policy (OSPT). As a follow-up to the meeting they organised
a White House petition calling for “free access over the Internet to
scientific journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research”.
The petition quickly attracted the requisite 25,000 signatures needed
to trigger a response from the government, which came this February in
the shape of the White House Memorandum.

Importantly, the Memorandum directs “each Federal agency with over
$100 million in annual conduct of research and development
expenditures to develop a plan to support increased public access to
the results of research funded by the Federal Government”.

But for me there is no better evidence of the efficacy of SPARC’s
activities than the contents of an exchange I had a couple of years
ago with an employee of one of the larger traditional scholarly
publishers. When I suggested that perhaps publishers ought to stop
lobbying against OA and learn to love it, my interlocutor’s face
expressed a complicated mix of emotions — including exasperation and
muted anger, but also (I felt) some admiration for the OA movement. He
replied, “It’s not just publishers who are lobbying you know.” Then a
few seconds later he added, “I’ll tell you what, if you can get SPARC
to stop lobbying against us we will stop lobbying against Open
Access.”

Since then the OA movement has gone from strength to strength, in what
has become a classic David and Goliath contest — a smallish group of
impecunious but tireless OA advocates lined up against an army of
well-heeled corporations determined to stop them.

But how things will end we do not yet know. What is certain, as Joseph
concedes, is that “much still needs to be done” before the OA movement
can claim to have succeeded in its aims.

Earlier contributors to this series include palaeontologist Mike
Taylor, cognitive scientist Stevan Harnad, and former librarian Fred
Friend.

Joseph's Q&A can be read here:

http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/heather-joseph-on-state-of-open-access.html