Self-Archiving Mandates

In Open Access News, Peter Suber excerpted the following from the AIP Position On Open Access & Public Access:

"AIP is fearful of and against government mandates that provide rules in favor of one business model over another.
AIP is against funding agencies mandating free access to articles after they have undergone costly peer review or editing by publishers."

It is important not to confuse AIP (American Institute of Physics) with APS (American Physical Society). AIP is merely the publisher of the journals of APS, which is a Learned Society (and one of the most progressive on OA).

Evolving APS Copyright Policy (American Physical Society) (began Dec 1999)
APS copyright policy (Mar 2002)

Don't take the grumbling of AIP too seriously. The APS/AIP division-of-labor is optimal, because it allows us to separate the scientific/scholarly interests from the publishing interests (which are so thoroughly conflated in most other Learned Societies, notably the American Chemical Society!).

ACS meeting comments on e-prints
Not a Proud Day in the Annals of the Royal Society

The AIP is basically saying that the interests of generating and protecting AIP's current revenue streams and cost-recovery model trump the interests of research, researchers, their institutions, their funders, and the interests of the tax-paying public that funds their funders.

In contrast, the international Open Access movement, five out of eight UK Research Councils, the Wellcome Trust, a growing number of Australian and Canadian Research Councils, CERN, the proposed US Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA), the provosts of most of the top US universities, the European Commission, the Developing World, and a growing number of individual universities and research institutions think otherwise.

(By the way, self-archiving mandates do not "favor of one business model over another": They are not about business models at all. They are about maximizing the access, usage and impact of publicly funded research.).

AIP is the publishing tail, yet again trying to wag the research dog. Soon we will see an end of this sort of nonsense.

Berners-Lee, T., De Roure, D., Harnad, S. and Shadbolt, N. (2005) Journal publishing and author self-archiving: Peaceful Co-Existence and Fruitful Collaboration. Technical Report, Department of Electronics and computer Science, University of Southampton.

Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum