[Taxacom] open access and US

[Donat Agosti]

"But it is not just Congress that should act. For too long scientists,
libraries and research institutions have supported the publishing status quo
out of a combination of tradition and convenience."

 

"Researchers should cut off commercial journals' supply of papers by
publishing exclusively in one of the many "open-access" journals that are
perfectly capable of managing peer review"

 

In today
<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/11/opinion/research-bought-then-paid-for.htm
l> 's New York Time is an op/ed article by Eisen, cofounder of the Public
Library of Science about the Research Works Act
<http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c112:H.R.3699:>  that would, if it
passes the US Congress, "forbid the N.I.H. to require, as it now does, that
its grantees provide copies of the papers they publish in peer-reviewed
journals to the library".

 

Though we formally do not belong to the NIH-family, this decision will
definitely have a great impact in the way we disseminate now and in the
future our research work. We are not as well funded, but we have an
additional moral obligation, besides many of us being paid by the taxpayers,
that we disseminate our discoveries as widely as possible to give the
rapidly and but increasingly silenced nature a chance: Without our results,
conservation of the biosphere is crippeled.

 

Once more, we need to talk to our publishers, we need to talk to our
politicians, that they foster open access rather than crippling the
fledgling system of open access. We need to think why and then how we
publish that serves best our needs. We need to consider, where we publish:
publish in Zookeys <http://www.pensoft.net/journals/zookeys/issue/50/> ,
PloS <http://www.plos.org/> , BMC <http://www.biomedcentral.com/> , Zootaxa
<http://www.mapress.com/zootaxa/>  (and pay the modest open access fee) to
name a few options or any other journal that provides open access and in the
three former guarantees the widest possible distribution of its results,
including the integration of the work in the huge body of publications
archived at Pub Med Central - which also connects our field with the vast
field of biomedical literature, that is open as well, so far.

 

Donat Agosti

Plazi

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/11/opinion/research-bought-then-paid-for.html