Science in the Open » Blog Archive » Update on publishers and SOPA: Time for scholarly publishers to disavow the AAP

"I was willing to give AAP members some benefit of the doubt [for not disavowing AAP's support for SOPA], hoping that some of them might come out publicly against SOPA. But if that was the hope then the AAP have just stepped over the line. In a spectacularly disingenuous press release the AAP claims significant credit for a new act just submitted to the U.S. Congress. This, in a repeat of some previous efforts, would block any efforts on the part of U.S. federal agencies to enact open access policies, even to the extent of blocking them from continuing to run the spectacularly successful PubMedCentral. That this comes days before the deadline for a request for information on the development of appropriate and balanced policies that would support access to the published results of U.S. taxpayer-funded research is a calculated political act, an abrogation of any principled stance, and clear signal of a lack of any interest in a productive discussion on how to move scholarly communications forward into a networked future. I was willing to give AAP members some space. Not any more. The time has come to decide whether you want to be part of the future of research communication or whether you want to legislate to try and stop that future happening...."