[Taxacom] open access and US

[Kenneth Kinman]

Dear All,         
     A good bit of discussion on this topic at DML (Dinosaur Mailing
List), ending with the following post (which can be traced back to
earlier posts in the thread):

http://dml.cmnh.org/2012Jan/msg00210.html

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Donat Agosti wrote:
"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.html>
'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