[Taxacom] open access and US

[Donat Agosti]

For those in the US that want to fight against this bill, here is a template
of a letter you can send to your representative
http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/action/action_access/draftletter_HR3699.shtml

 or one of the signatures of the bill
http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/action/action_access/12-0106.shtml

The Alliance of Taxpayer Access  has been instrumental in getting the NIH
requirement for the archiving of publications from NIH funded research.

Here is a major US academic publisher that is against the support of this
bill that is highly supported by the Associaton of American Publishers
[message forwarded on GOAL by Peter Suber]

"
Ellen Faran, Director of the MIT Press, has given me permission to share the
following statement:

"The AAP's press release on the Research Works Act does not reflect the
position of the MIT Press; nor, I imagine, the position of many other
scholarly presses whose mission is centrally focused on broad dissemination.
We will not, however, withdraw from the AAP on this issue as we value the
Association's work overall and the opportunity to participate as a member of
the larger and diverse publishing community."

Comment: I believe MIT Press is the first AAP-member press to disavow the
AAP position on the Research Works Act. Kudos and profound thanks to Ellen
Faran and MIT Press for their leadership on this issue. 


Peter Suber
Director, Harvard Open Access Project
Fellow, Berkman Center for Internet & Society
Senior Researcher, SPARC
gplus.to/petersuber
"

And here is the press release by the Association of American Publishers
http://www.publishers.org/press/56/

Donat




-----Original Message-----
From: taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
[mailto:taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu] On Behalf Of Donat Agosti
Sent: Wednesday, 11 January 2012 2:15 PM
To: TAXACOM at MAILMAN.NHM.KU.EDU
Subject: [Taxacom] open access and US

"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 
l> 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

 

_______________________________________________

Taxacom Mailing List
Taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
http://mailman.nhm.ku.edu/mailman/listinfo/taxacom

The Taxacom archive going back to 1992 may be searched with either of these
methods:

(1) by visiting http://taxacom.markmail.org

(2) a Google search specified as:  site:mailman.nhm.ku.edu/pipermail/taxacom
your search terms here