Threat of job loss as motivation for Research Works Act: real or fear-mongering?

Connotea Imports 2012-07-31

Summary:

"I find it difficult to silently read the AAP endorsement of the Research Works Act. Multiple readings later I still find myself yelling aloud at its twisted positions and statements. Most of my rebuttals take the form of expletive + “no, that isn’t true” or “give me a break” + a silent prayer that policymakers won’t take the positions seriously. But what about the AAP threat that the industry and 30,000 jobs are in danger if the government supports, requests, or requires more open scholarship? I suspect many politicians in the US government will take that very seriously. Threatening job losses in the US right now is a Great Card, and publishers keep bringing it to the table. The Jobs Card makes me furious because *if* scholarship can be done better it *should* be done better, full stop. But with the government really considering about these issues and soliciting feedback, it is time to get beyond that and see if, you know, it happens to be true that 30,000 US jobs are in jeopardy. If so, we need to figure out how to address that in our discussions, because we can be darn sure the government will balance that against the benefits of openness. First, what is at risk? Scholarly publishing as an industry isn’t going away any time soon: physicists have arXiv and they still publish in journals. What is at risk is the traditional subscription-based business model. If the scholarly article-of-record is made immediately available with no restrictions, there is no reason for anyone to pay subscription fees. Luckily, BMC and PLoS have already demonstrated that an author/author’s funder-pays model can work (at least for fields funded by federal money, with access to publication budget line items… the same fields that would be subject to federal mandates on openness). Traditional publishers could move to this model if they wanted to. So what is at risk is the business model, not the industry....Publishers are fear mongering with talk of loss of jobs. As far as I can tell, there is no big risk, if publishers are willing to move with the times and embrace new business models...."

Link:

http://researchremix.wordpress.com/2012/01/07/rwa-job-losses/

Updated:

01/18/2012, 20:34

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » Connotea Imports

Tags:

ru.no oa.new oa.comment oa.usa oa.legislation oa.negative oa.rwa oa.nih oa.copyright

Authors:

petersuber

Date tagged:

07/31/2012, 11:54

Date published:

01/11/2012, 09:58