Re: AAU misinterprets House Appropriations Committee Recommendation

From: Stevan Harnad <harnad_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Date: Wed, 4 Aug 2004 17:35:51 +0100

[Peter Suber has a posting in Open Access News in which he described SPARC's
Rick Johnson's very appropriate corrective to the misinterpretations of the
House Appropriations Committee's recommended mandate. The misinterperetations
were very much like the misinterpration by the AAU and by the press. Here is
Peter's OAN Posting.]

    More on the NIH OA plan
    Peter Suber (Posted in OA News on Tuesday, August 03, 2004)
    http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2004_08_01_fosblogarchive.html#a109158843132781812

    Publishers Visit NIH To Protest Free Access Initiative, Library
    Journal, August 4, 2004.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA441041?display=NewsNews&industry=News&industryid=1986&verticalid=151
    A short, unsigned news story on the NIH OA plan from the House
    Appropriations Committee. Excerpt: "While supporters of open access
    hailed a proposal by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to make
    all taxpayer-funded NIH research freely available within six months,
    more than 100 publishers yesterday visited the NIH offices to voice
    their strong opposition. Among their complaints: the NIH tucked
    the measure into an appropriations bill, which denied publishers,
    including society publishers, the opportunity to be heard on the
    issue. 'This measure caught publishers completely off-guard,' said
    Barbara Meredith, VP of Professional and Scholarly Publishing at the
    Association of American Publishers (AAP). 'This essentially mandates
    open access without any evidentiary hearings or studies.' The meeting
    was hosted by NIH Chairman Elias Zerhouni, and was the first in what
    is expected to be a number of hearings on the proposal, including,
    Meredith adds, a possible colloquy sponsored by the AAP.

    "In response to publisher outcry, Rick Johnson, director of SPARC,
    in a letter sent to Zerhouni yesterday, suggested that NIH had made
    the right choice and that publishers appeared to 'misunderstand
    the proposal, which proposes open archiving, not open-access
    publication.' Open archiving, Johnson said, 'is not a threat to
    journals.' "

Pertinent Prior AmSci Topic Thread:

    "The UK report, press coverage, and the Green and Gold Roads to
    Open Access"
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3871.html
Received on Wed Aug 04 2004 - 17:35:51 BST

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