The Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers (AAP) and DC Principles Coalition for Free Access to Science expressed their concerns in a letter to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). The letter was submitted in response to a December 9, 2009, OSTP request for comments on ‘Public Access Policies for Science and Technology Funding Agencies Across the Federal Government.’
Scholarly and scientific journal publishers called on the Administration to adopt a collaborative approach to the development of a federal policy to expand public access to scientific information. They encouraged the Administration to avoid adopting policies that would damage the very institutions that researchers, the public and government itself rely on to peer review, publish, disseminate and preserve scientific information.
Among the proposals under evaluation is executive branch action that would direct agencies to post articles online that have already undergone peer review and other significant improvements by publishers. A mandatory policy would undermine essential intellectual property protections and blunt the ability of publishers to recover the considerable costs associated with creating journals, disseminating scientific information, building and maintaining digital platforms, managing and preserving the scientific record and coordinating the peer review process. It would artificially force a shift of those costs from users who subscribe to journals to authors, who would increasingly be called on to fund the cost of publishing their articles.
Scholarly societies, non-profit and commercial publishers are opposed to the approach taken by the National Institutes of Health in 2008, which mandated access to the post-peer reviewed articles. Publishers are concerned that inflexible, government-mandated solutions will undermine the substantial contribution the private sector makes to science through its management of the complex process that fuels millions of peer-reviewed journal articles every year.
The full text of the letter is available at http://www.pspcentral.org/OSTP.cfm
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