The press just keeps on missing the mark! "American and British Lawmakers Endorse Open-Access Publishing" Andrea Foster and Lila Guterman Chronicle of Higher Education, July 30, 2004 http://chronicle.com/prm/weekly/v50/i47/47a01302.htm
> "In a double coup for the open-access movement this month, > committees of the U.S. Congress and British Parliament recommended > that papers resulting from government-financed research be made > available free. The committees recommended that the U.S. and British > governments require researchers to deposit in free, online archives > any articles that arise from research sponsored, respectively, > by the National Institutes of Health and any British agency. So far, so good. That part was correct. But then: > The British committee further recommended that journal publishers > adopt an open-access model in which authors would pay to publish > and subscription fees would be eliminated. Both governments are > expected to act on the committees' recommendations this year." No, the British committee did not recommend that; on the contrary, they explicitly refrained from recommending it and recommended only further experimentation with it, along with funding to help pay author-institutions costs for OA Publishing. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/39903.htm Nor is the title of the story correct: "American and British Lawmakers Endorse Open-Access Publishing" "Endorsement" is ambiguous. What, if anything, both the Americans and the British endorsed was Open Access (OA), not OA Publishing. They recommended mandating OA *Provision* through author/institution self-archiving of published articles (the "green" road to OA), not OA Publishing (the golden road to OA). http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/accessdebate/21.html Stevan Harnad UNIVERSITIES: If you have adopted or plan to adopt an institutional policy of providing Open Access to your own research article output, please describe your policy at: http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php UNIFIED DUAL OPEN-ACCESS-PROVISION POLICY: BOAI-2 ("gold"): Publish your article in a suitable open-access journal whenever one exists. http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#journals BOAI-1 ("green"): Otherwise, publish your article in a suitable toll-access journal and also self-archive it. http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/ http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml AMERICAN SCIENTIST OPEN ACCESS FORUM: A complete Hypermail archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open access to the peer-reviewed research literature online (1998-2004) is available at: http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html To join the Forum: http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html Post discussion to: [email protected]
