What doesn't justify longer embargoes on publicly-funded research. Phil Davi...

"Phil Davis has shown that the half-life of research articles differs from field to field. The half-life of an article here is "the median age of articles downloaded from a publisher's website." ...Unfortunately the data are not being carefully used by publishers who want to lengthen the permissible embargoes in federal OA policies. Note that Davis himself does not make the careless arguments I'm about to describe. There are two problems in arguing that the Davis study somehow entails that OA policies should permit longer embargoes....The first problem is that the Davis data doesn't show that short embargoes cause cancellations. This is a larger problem that it may appear to be. Publishers have been claiming for years that short embargoes cause cancellations, but there is no evidence to support the claim....[T]he second problem is larger and more important than the first. Suppose we had good data showing that short embargoes caused cancellations, or that a uniform embargo across fields caused more cancellations in the fields with longer article half-lives. It still would not follow that policies should permit longer embargoes. To get to that conclusion we'd have to add premises. These premises are often assumed, but they are remarkably weak once made explicit for examination. We'd have to add the premise that public policies should maximize publisher revenue before maximizing public access to publicly-funded research. Or we'd have to add the premise that policies should put publisher interests ahead of researcher interests. I reject these premises. Research funding agencies, especially public funding agencies, ought to reject them as well...."