Two of my recent blogposts may be of interest to CWB members:
Open Access: Transformative Change. An Open Letter to the President and Members of the American Chemical Society. In brief, the President of ACS has written a letter to members, suggesting that open access is not meaningful change. This blogpost points to the transformative potential of open access as an unprecedented public good.
Beyond Peer Review: Collaboration builds on CWB member Jean-Claude Bradley’s Blogger Lab Notebook experiment.
Heather-
From Ann’s letter:
Which leads me to wonder: Is this change for its own sake? Does the new system really provide value that is presently unavailable under the current federal-private partnership? I am particularly concerned because now some people propose that NIH make the policy mandatory and require submission compliance just six months after publication. Even more troubling, the U.S. Congress is discussing legislation to require just such compliance by scientists—even if only partially funded by the federal government.
To be sure, taxpayers fund the conduct of federal research, but scientific societies like ACS and its sister societies add tremendous value to that research through critical peer review, technical editing, dissemination, and archiving— all of which require enormous investment. ACS has been a long-time partner in peer-reviewing and publishing federally funded research in our high-quality journals—among the most often quoted, cited, and cost-efficient in the scientific publishing world.
The value of scientific research—especially in chemistry—exists long after its publication and certainly well past 6 months. Moreover, it will be difficult to maintain a cost-efficient, high-caliber peer review and permanent archiving system if scientific societies have just six months to recoup costs before mandating free access. The prospect of “free” access to literature may seem good, but high quality literature at an affordable price is better.
I think the lack of a good argument here almost speaks for itself…. and she acknowlegdes that taxpayers are paying for it, why should we have to pay to see the results?
ELMO
ps- isn’t the ACS a non-profit organization?
Good point on the non-profit, Elmo – as we were discussing at last night’s meeting, if we want to be a scholarly society, isn’t working in the public interest a requirement? If you could copy the relevant sections, that would be very helpful.
Here is a link to Ann’s original e-mail to ACS members – further comments welcome:
https://mx2.arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/2878.html