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