When Public Access Policy Meets Publishing Power | Katina Magazine

"Publishers who rely on subscription fees to fund their businesses have a great deal to lose from a national public access policy. Elsevier’s responses to efforts to establish such a policy in the United States—whether supporting competing legislation, offering oppositional public comment, or delaying action—reveal the strategies publishers might deploy in an attempt to shape such policy to their interests.

Elsevier’s comments about public access are available because they were part of a larger collection of responses to a federal request for information, and their support of RWA and unresponsiveness to NIH policy were public. Documentation from other publishers is not as readily available. SAGE Publishing, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, and Springer Nature did all respond to the 2020 request for information, cautioning OSTP against implementing a wide public access policy; but the scant evidence of their support for RWA and their resistance to NIH policy is not as clear. Web archives have been useful in pointing to some brief public statements, but not as helpful in locating the documents themselves."