Congratulations to Richard Poynder on a brilliant and extremely valuable interview with Ian Gibson. As one who gave oral Evidence to the Science and Technology Committee in 2004, I can vouch for the accuracy of the comments on the Committee's work. Reading the Poynder interview made me fetch my copies of the Committee Report and Evidence, and I was immediately reminded of the thorough, evidence-based investigation by the Committee. The 2004 documents ran to 114 pages for the Report and 479 pages of oral and written Evidence. Compare that with the measly 140 pages in the Finch Report, with very little evidence cited, and you can understand that the Finch Group missed or ignored much valuable evidence on the value of OA repositories and came to some poor recommendations in that area. One telling aspect of the Poynder interview was the way Ian Gibson changed his view of the Finch Report once Richard Poynder told him of the evidence of the large volume of OA content in repositories, evidence which does not appear in the Finch Report.
Re-reading the JISC written Memorandum to the Committee (in which I had a big hand), much of what we wrote would be true today and our recommendations to the Committee still valid. The biggest change since 2004 is that the UK Government of 2012 has accepted the case for open access which the Government of 2004 rejected. The problem is that their decision to support only journal publication for open access to current research reports leaves unresolved the basic flaws in the scholarly communication system that were recognised in 2004, flaws such as the effect upon prices of a lack of competition in access to a particular publication and of the lack of a direct financial link between the author as purchaser and the publisher as supplier of a service to the author. Ian Gibson makes very clear the efforts of publishers in 2004 to stay "at the centre of a system that was making them a lot of money", and publishers' influence upon current Government policy is directed towards the same end. This would not matter if the losers were not the research community in the effect upon the research budget and the UK taxpayer at a time of financial hardship. Richard Poynder's commentary on the after-effects of the 2004 Report is accurate in pointing to the change in publisher policy from outright opposition to open access to support for gold open access as the means of ensuring their dominant role in scholarly communication. The only point I would add to that analysis is that publishers were un-intentionally encouraged in that process by the Wellcome Trust decision to pay publishers for immediate deposit of published articles in UKPMC. This action (not intended to justify gold OA but to raise the deposit rate in a repository) by a strong supporter of OA able to afford author publication charges fed through into the Finch Report and UK Government policy, and risks creating difficulties for other funders and institutions not as wealthy as the biomedical community. Whatever the future holds I look back on the work of Ian Gibson and his colleagues on the Science and Technology Committee as evidence of the value to democracy of the UK parliamentary system and in particular the value of the Committees of Parliament in inquiring into truth. We had another example of this value last year in the questioning of certain newspaper executives. Long may the work of independent-minded politicians like Ian Gibson continue! Fred Friend Honorary Director Scholarly Communication UCL http://www.friendofopenaccess.org.uk -----Original Message----- From: Richard Poynder Sent: Monday, October 29, 2012 10:42 AM To: scholc...@ala.org Subject: [SCHOLCOMM] The OA Interviews: Ian Gibson, former Chairman of the UK House of Commons Science & Technology Committee Like all successful movements, Open Access (OA) has experienced a number of milestone events. Amongst the more significant of these were the creation of the physics preprint repository arXiv in 1991, the 1994 Subversive Proposal, the 2002 Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), and the introduction in 2005 of the first Open Access Policy of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). However, one of the more interesting but less celebrated events in the history of OA is surely the 2004 Inquiry into scientific publication conducted by the UK House of Commons Science & Technology Committee. The inquiry seems particularly noteworthy in the wake of this year’s controversial Finch Report, and the new OA policy that Research Councils UK (RCUK) announced in response ... ... Given the very different conclusions that the Finch Committee had reached earlier this year, I became keen to find out more about the origins and the process of the 2004 Inquiry. So I contacted Dr Ian Gibson, the then Chairman of the Science & Technology Select Committee, and Labour MP for Norwich North. To my delight, he agreed to do an interview with me ... More here: http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/the-oa-interviews-ian-gibson-former.html _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
