By JENNIFER HOWARD
BRIDGING THE DIVIDE: This winter has been colder than usual in many parts of the country, but in the open-access wars it’s been a season of heated rhetoric. In January reports circulated in the journal Nature and in Scientific American that a division of the Association of American Publishers had hired a “pit bull” PR firm to help it respond to the threat posed by open access. Argue that “public access equals government censorship,” the flaks reportedly advised.
Then, in February, an editor over at the Public Library of Science, a nonprofit group that publishes open-access journals, issued a call to arms on the group’s blog: “For the sake of global scientific progress, human development, and poverty alleviation, it is surely time to end the slavery of traditional publishing.”
A noticeably milder tone prevails in the Association of American University Presses’ statement on open access, released last month. It neither embraces nor rejects the open-access revolution. Instead it calls for a broader, calmer approach, one that balances the virtues of the old and the new. And it asks that the discussion include the humanities and social sciences along with the scientific, technical, and medical fields that have been the primary focus of open-access campaigns, “lest an unfortunate new ‘digital divide’ should arise between fields and between different types of publishing.”
Read the entire article: http://chronicle.com/weekly/v53/i28/28a02001.htm
Chronicle of Higher Education, Volume 53, Issue 28, Page A20, March 16, 2007
Related Article:
University Presses Take Their Stand on Open Access
The open access debate is one of the hottest topics in academic publishing, with advocates for access and publishers battling for political and public support. University presses have been feeling somewhat in the middle and sometimes ignored — and they responded Tuesday with a policy paper outlining their perspective.
In many respects, the document from the Association of American University Presses focuses on potential harm that could be done to their operations by the open access model, talking about the potential for it to hurt circulation revenues, and emphasizing that university presses are not exactly wealthy institutions. But the paper also talks about the many experiments university presses are undertaking with open access or alternative pricing models — and goes one further. While the open access debate has focused on scholarly journals, the presses suggest that models that work for journals may well also work for monographs.
read the article at:
http://insidehighered.com/news/2007/02/28/open
Inside Higher Ed, Feb. 28, 2007
