Don't Believe the Publishers' Hype: Support Open Access | Electronic Frontier Foundation

"Once again, we are seeing entrenched interests try to fight the future with scare tactics and misinformation. This time, it's major journal publishers, and their target is open access to taxpayer-funded research.   First things first: The reason the publishers are on the warpath is that state and federal legislators are looking to expand open access.  One of the leading bills is California's open access bill (AB 609). This legislation is being discussed in the Assembly's Appropriations Committee tomorrow. If you're a California resident, now is the time to contact your Assembly member and ask that they support public access to taxpayer-funded research. Now for a dose of reality. As a nation, we've already seen successful public access policies—most notably the NIH public access policy, which requires research funded by one of the nation's largest funding bodies to be put in a free repository within a year of first publication. A bill now pending in Congress, the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act (FASTR) would expand the NIH policy to a dozen other funding bodies while also reducing the embargo period to six months. Over the last several years, the academic medical community has embraced open access, and publishers that adapted to this policy are still making record profits. But they aren't happy about it and they certainly don't want expansion. Now that the open access train appears to be leaving the station, their message is simple: we don't need a mandate, just trust us to handle open access. The trouble is they think open access means nothing more than providing publicly accessible links to their own publications. Most recently, the Association of American Publishers (AAP) sent a letter to the California Assembly's Appropriations Committee full of numbers and allegations that would scare anyone—if only they were based in fact. Similar language was used to challenge FASTR last February, when the bill was introduced into the House and Senate. U.C. Berkeley professor and PLoS-co-founder Michael Eisen has done a thorough takedown of the AAP's letter. We'll focus here on a few major points ...  Claim: The policies would add significant costs to agencies' and states' budgets  ... Claim: The policies would 'undermine publishers' efforts to provide access to high-quality peer-review research publications in a sustainable way' ... Claim: These bills will negatively impact jobs and force journals to go the way of newspapers ... Claim: The policies require agencies and states to 'undertake extensive, open-ended work already being performed successfully by the private sector,' including the fact that 'publishers are devoted to providing access to research and invest in the dissemination of research in a variety of ways' ..."