From: Richard Poynder <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 18 Jul 2012 20:03:22 +0100

The Electronic Publishing Trust for Development responds to the Finch Report.

Extract:

"It is difficult not to sound unprofessional and populist when
describing the huge imbalance between the importance of sharing
essential research and that of retaining the profits of the publishing
service industry, but publishing exists to support research, not the
other way round. The resolution to solve publishing deprivation via
the Gold route will take many years and significant financial input to
achieve, whereas the far smaller costs and ‘do-ability’ required to
set up repositories are immediately achievable. There are now
33,914,611 articles deposited in institutional repositories to date.
How can the importance of this strategy which has both scale and
momentum have been so trivialised by the Finch team?

"There is a myth circulated regarding developing country access
problems — ‘There is no evidence of a lack of access,' ‘We have
established the Research for Life programmes that solve the problem’.
. . But our decade-long experience working with researchers in the
South, and many of the stories collected for OA Week and which are
available from our web site demolishes the first myth, while the
problems with the R4L programmes have been well documented — sudden
withdrawal by publishers of journals, availability only from
designated libraries, selection of journals by publishers rather than
according to research needs and so on."

More here:

http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/the-finch-report-and-its-implications.html

Richard Poynder