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