From: Glenn Hampson <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, Feb 16, 2015 at 4:24 PM

Hi Ann, Richard Poynder was kind enough to forward me your email to
the liblicense-l listserv. I don’t subscribe to this list, so perhaps
you would be able to distribute this note as warranted.

The OSI working group was/is a group of volunteers who signed up last
fall to participate in an online conversation about the future of
scholarly publishing. We (nSCI) invited interested participants from a
number of lists in September of 2014 (though, unfortunately, not the
liblicense list---my bad), and began our online discussion in October.
The main conversation just wrapped up last month. The draft paper you
noted in your email was posted online and also circulated back to
listserv communities for review and comment. The authors and editors
are noted on the copyright page.

We had around 120 people signed up for this conversation---of whom
maybe a few dozen were active participants. I’m not sure why all
didn’t sign---it’s mostly just a lack of effort on our part to make
sure that all names were included (we’ll try again to get more names
listed before the final version is sealed). I know two people were
worried about signing due to potential conflicts of interest with
their employers. But signing doesn’t signify agreement with the
recommendations or findings---just participation in this conversation.

We had a good mix of open access supporters and critics take part in
this conversation, plus folks who are actively engaged in trying to
push the ball forward in the marketplace and figure out how to make
change work at the library level and government level. There’s enough
criticism of OA in the report to make most supporters uncomfortable,
and enough support of OA to make most critics uncomfortable. This
report is still in the comment stage, so if you think we need to make
some changes, please feel free to let me know.

I would caution against calling this a “study.” It isn’t. It’s just
the curated notes of an illuminating online conversation between some
very well-informed and interested people who operate in this space---a
conversation that grew out of the OA events of this past summer, and
the exchanges that were occurring on a few related listserv at the
time (like the scholcomm listserv, research admin listserv, and a few
others). There wasn’t a careful and deliberate effort here to first
identify and then invite all the right people.  The stakeholder
community here is so broad and deep---that task in itself will be a
research project!

As for nSCI, we’re just a small all-volunteer nonprofit charity
managing a portfolio of projects (like OSI) that are primarily focused
on improving the communication that happens inside science. We’ve been
around for about four years now. We’re not backed by anyone (other
than our members) and we don’t have an agenda, other than working for
improvement.  Our web address is nationalscience.org. Our projects are
listed at nationalscience.org/projects. I’d be happy to answer any
specific questions you might have after reviewing our website. I
apologize for opacity----it’s certainly not deliberate (our website is
overdue for a makeover), but then we’re a little bit off the beaten
path, at least right for now.

I’d be happy to discuss this effort with you, including providing more
details about the ASR effort. We’ve set up a separate listserv to deal
with conference planning discussions and ASR development issues.
Anyone interested is welcome to join----just let me know and I’ll sign
you up.

Sincerely,

Glenn Hampson
Executive Director
National Science Communication Institute (nSCI)
2320 N 137th Street
Seattle, WA 98133
(206) 417-3607
[log in to unmask]
nationalscience.org