The International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers (STM) has applauded the efforts of the Scholarly Publishing Roundtable in seeking to establish broad stakeholder agreement and for involving leading researchers and incorporating their research in the Roundtable deliberations. The Scholarly Publishing Roundtable was set up in 2008 by the US House of Representatives Committee on Science and Technology in collaboration with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP).
STM has stated its support for the general principles that the Roundtable has generated - the critical need for peer review, the importance of sustainable business models, the goal of widening access, and the move to improved utility and interoperability. The Association supports the recommendation that OSTP establish a public advisory committee on which interested parties, including STM publishers, are represented.
STM takes issue, however, with some of the other recommendations and goals expressed in the Report. While it supports US agencies in the development of public access policies to the results of research funded by those agencies, it does not agree that the scholarly articles arising from publisher investment and value add fall under this category. Government research grants currently cover the cost of the research only, and not the costs of publication, STM has stated.
Welcoming the consultation and collaboration that has occurred in the industry, STM believes the goal of US agencies in establishing a ‘global publishing system’ is redundant and wasteful and ignores the essentially international nature of STM publishing. According to the organisation, STM publishing has, without any government assistance anywhere in the world, enabled more access to more people than at any time in history.
STM supports the need for embargo periods if there is to be no compensation for the use of journal mediated content. There is, however, no evidence whatsoever to support the recommendation that embargo periods of 0-12 months could be adopted for ‘many sciences’ without problem. STM is leading a three-year experiment part‐funded by the European Commission (the PEER Project) to find out the effects of various embargo periods on journals. The Association strongly encourages such an evidence-based policy investigation in the US as well.
STM supports the recommendation that the final published article should be given primacy (the so called VoR or Version of Record) over the proliferation of other imperfect earlier versions. However, it is through this final version – and the creation and maintenance of their authoritative journals – that STM publishers provide significant added value, the Association has stated. To make final published articles (VoRs) free immediately upon publication must involve some mechanism of financial compensation, it has observed.
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