The press just keeps on missing the mark!
"American and British Lawmakers Endorse Open-Access Publishing"
Andrea Foster and Lila Guterman
Chronicle of Higher Education, July 30, 2004
http://chronicle.com/prm/weekly/v50/i47/47a01302.htm
> "In a double coup for the open-access movement this month,
> committees of the U.S. Congress and British Parliament recommended
> that papers resulting from government-financed research be made
> available free. The committees recommended that the U.S. and British
> governments require researchers to deposit in free, online archives
> any articles that arise from research sponsored, respectively,
> by the National Institutes of Health and any British agency.
So far, so good. That part was correct. But then:
> The British committee further recommended that journal publishers
> adopt an open-access model in which authors would pay to publish
> and subscription fees would be eliminated. Both governments are
> expected to act on the committees' recommendations this year."
No, the British committee did not recommend that; on the contrary,
they explicitly refrained from recommending it and recommended only
further experimentation with it, along with funding to help pay
author-institutions costs for OA Publishing.
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/39903.htm
Nor is the title of the story correct:
"American and British Lawmakers Endorse Open-Access Publishing"
"Endorsement" is ambiguous. What, if anything, both the Americans and
the British endorsed was Open Access (OA), not OA Publishing. They
recommended mandating OA *Provision* through author/institution
self-archiving of published articles (the "green" road to OA), not OA
Publishing (the golden road to OA).
Stevan Harnad
UNIVERSITIES: If you have adopted or plan to adopt an institutional
policy of providing Open Access to your own research article output,
please describe your policy at:
http://www.eprints.org/signup/
UNIFIED DUAL OPEN-ACCESS-PROVISION POLICY:
BOAI-2 ("gold"): Publish your article in a suitable open-access
journal whenever one exists.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#journals
BOAI-1 ("green"): Otherwise, publish your article in a suitable
toll-access journal and also self-archive it.
http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml
AMERICAN SCIENTIST OPEN ACCESS FORUM:
A complete Hypermail archive of the ongoing discussion of providing
open access to the peer-reviewed research literature online (1998-2004)
is available at:
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html
To join the Forum:
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html
Post discussion to:
american-scientist-open-access-forum at amsci.org
