This is cross-posted from Peter Suber's Open Access News http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_03_28_fosblogarchive.html#a108088191170583007
More on the UK inquiry Richard Poynder, The Inevitable and the Optimal, Information Today, April 1, 2004. http://www.infotoday.com/it/apr04/poynder.shtml Poynder's detailed observations of the oral testimony. Excerpt: "Certainly, many of the 80-plus people attending on the first day had come to see publishers called to account for their part in the ongoing journal price-inflation crisis. They wanted to see the school bullies given a bloody nose....Uppermost in the politicians' minds, however, was the knowledge that there's now an alternative to traditional publishing: open access. They were clearly attracted to a model that promised to replace ever more expensive journal subscriptions with one that freely distributed research papers over the Internet. While claiming to be neutral, publishers were evidently bent on discrediting open access....But the most surprising comment came when publishers were asked how they intended to enfranchise those currently unable to access scientific research either because they are not personal subscribers, not members of a subscribing institution, or have exceeded concurrent user limits. Jarvis startled the audience by replying that it was dangerous to make medical information widely available to the public....Apparently agreeing, Charkin nodded vigorously and said, 'The unprocessed data of scientific research papers is very tough for a layperson.' It seemed both publishers felt that denying people access to information for their own good was a tenable proposition. Unfortunately, their remarks served to starkly contrast the autocratic tendencies of publishers with the democratic aspirations of the open access movement, casting the latter in a more desirable light." ----------------- Here is another excerpt from Richard's article (not in Peter's posting): "Self-archiving, however, is the fastest growing form of open access as scientists, determined to liberate their research from publishers' financial firewalls, archive more and more of their papers on the Web" And the article's title derives from: Harnad, Stevan (1997) How to Fast-Forward Serials to the Inevitable and the Optimal for Scholars and Scientists. Serials Librarian 30: 73-81. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/H(arnad/harnad97.learned.serials.html Reprinted in C. Christiansen & C. Leatham, Eds. Pioneering New Serials Frontiers: From Petroglyphs to CyberSerials. NY: Haworth Press. In French translation as: "Comment Accelerer l'Ineluctable Evolution des Revues Erudites vers la Solution Optimale pour les Chercheurs et la Recherche" http://www.enssib.fr/eco-doc/harnadinteg.html http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/documents/disk0/00/00/16/95/index.html