From: Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 16 Jan 2012 23:32:05 -0600

When I was director of Penn State University Press, I joined
Rockefeller's Mike Rossner, Michigan's Phil Pochoda, and seven other
university press directors in dissenting from the AAUP/AAP position
supporting the Conyers bill to overturn the NIH's Public Access
Policy.  I believe in the principle that research funded by the U.S.
government should be made freely available to the tax-paying public.

At the same time, I believe that a better approach than the one
currently in place would be to require any government agency that
funds research to require submission of a final report on that
research to be posted immediately upon acceptance on a government web
site openly accessible to all (unless, of course, the research is
related to a project classified for national security reasons).

I think this approach is preferable because, unlike the current NIH
policy, (1) it would make the research results immediately available
(not after a 12-month delay, added to the delay that already occurs
when an author writes up an article to be published in a journal,
which goes through a process that itself takes time) and (2) it would
make the results available in the exact form in which they were
written up and not in the Green OA version that is now what gets
posted to PubMed Central (unless a publisher opts to allow an author
to post the archival version). This latter point is important because
citation of a final report is a preferable form of scholarship than
citation of a preliminary version of an article, which may differ in
significant respects from the archival version.

I also think that, for most purposes of use by U.S. citizens not
affiliated with an institution that subscribes to the professional
journal literature, the results as made available in a government
research report, if properly vetted by the agency itself to eliminate
errors before posting, are perfectly satisfactory. Their timeliness is
often a key factor, particularly to people wanting to learn out about
the most recent medical findings, and a policy that made those results
immediately available rather than after a delay of a year or more
would serve the public's interest better.

I am not sure why people are claiming that publishers like Elsevier,
by supporting the Research Works Act, are opposed to the dissemination
of knowledge. Many AAP-member publishers, including Elsevier (and Penn
State Press), permit authors of articles in the journals they publish
to post Green OA versions on their institutional or personal web
sites.

As for resigning from the AAP, one does not have to agree with every
position taken by an organization to which one belongs in order to
find continued membership meaningful and valuable. Otherwise, how many
of us would continue to be members of the Democratic or Republican
parties? Just for the record, the presses that are members of both
AAUP and AAP did not resign from the AAP when the AAUP supported the
CONFU Guidelines on Electronic Reserves and accession to the Berne
Convention when the AAP did not.

Sandy Thatcher



At 8:05 PM -0500 1/16/12, LIBLICENSE wrote:
>
> From: Richard Poynder <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Sat, Jan 14, 2012 at 8:24 AM
>
> In the past couple of days I have reported on the decisions by MIT Press,
> ITHAKA and Pennsylvania State University Press to distance themselves from
> the Research Works Act (RWA), otherwise known as HR 3699.
>
> All three organisations are members of the Association of American
> Publishers (AAP), which backs the RWA, and has described the bill as
> "significant legislation that will help reinforce America's leadership in
> scholarly and scientific publishing in the public interest and in the
> critical peer-review system that safeguards the quality of such research."
>
> If passed, however, the RWA would be a major setback for the Open Access
> movement, since it would reverse the Public Access Policy introduced by the
> US National Institutes of Health (NIH) requiring that all NIH-funded
> research is made freely accessible online, and it would prevent other
> federal agencies from imposing similar requirements on researchers.
>
> Unsurprisingly, therefore, the AAP has become the target for a lot  of
> criticism, with the research community calling on members of the association
> to disavow both the bill and AAP's support for it. There have also been
> calls for AAP members to resign in protest.
>
> However, it is not currently clear how representative the views of MIT
> Press, ITHAKA and Pennsylvania State University Press are. In an attempt to
> find out I have over the past week or so contacted around 35 members of the
> AAP, primarily scholarly publishers.
>
> http://poynder.blogspot.com/2012/01/can-aap-members-stay-neutral-in-row.html
>
> Richard Poynder