From: Beall, Jeffrey <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, Jul 16, 2013 at 11:16 AM

I second Anthony's remarks and am struck by Poynder's use of the term
"impecunious." Yesterday I looked at the Internal Revenue Service Form
990 for the Public Library of Science. According to the document, its
former CEO, Peter Jerram, drew a salary of $536,386 in 2011. That's a
huge salary.

Also, Heather Joseph, the subject of Poynder's interview, serves
voluntarily on the PLoS board of directors.

Here's a link to the form:
https://bulk.resource.org/irs.gov/eo/2012_11_EO/68-0492065_990_201112.pdf

Jeffrey Beall
University of Colorado Denver

________________________________

From: Anthony Watkinson <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 15 Jul 2013 05:58:03 +0100

I admire the industry of Richard Poynder and can remember the time
when he was an independent consultant but cannot agree with his
perception becoming history. He writes:

"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"

I can write from knowledge:

Some publishers are well-heeled but until recently only one publisher
has employed people to lobby about anything. They have also been very
reluctant to put enough money into their representative organisations.
Again people employed to lobby in these organisations are a new
development.

Where lobbying is done the main thrust has always been the defence of copyright.

Where there has and is lobbying against OA it is lobbying against
mandates. I cannot recall any publisher or publishing body trying to
stop BMC (2000-2001) from acting as an OA publisher. BMC can tell us
if there has been. Now of course they are members of representative
publishing bodies.

SPARC decided about 2001 to use its funds to promote OA and run down
its partnership programme. I do not consider that ARL is a tiny
organisation. Look at its basic staff list and then at the list of
(for example) of STM staff.  Whatever money they have put into SPARC
has been richly supplemented by foundations not directly perhaps but
to organisations like PLOS. Of course if you are characterised as
David you do have the advantage of having the Deity on your side.

Anthony

-----Original Message-----

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