Publishing Lobby

Re: More on the AAP complaints about the NIH policy

When will research journal publishers realize that research is conducted by researchers and funded by the tax-paying public for the sake of what is best for research, researchers, their institutions, the vast R&D industry, and the tax-paying public? Research is not being conducted and funded as a service to the research journal publishing industry.

Publicly elected officials and the NIH especially need to realize and remember this, rather than allowing themselves to be persuaded by the publisher lobby that there is some sort of "balance" issue here.

Research publishing is a service industry: Publishers are given the results of funded research, by researchers, for free, to be refereed (by researchers, again for free) and then published for subscription sales revenue (in which the researchers ask no share), so that the refereed research can be made accessible to all those who can use, apply and build upon it -- once again, to the benefit of research, researchers, and the tax-paying public that funds them.

Publishers' revenues come from subscription sales, which are currently making ends meet quite adequately.

If and when it should ever come to pass that Green Open Access self-archiving mandates make subscriptions unsustainable, the obvious solution will be for journal publishers to convert to Gold Open Access publishing (which some publishers have done already). But AAP is pre-emptively lobbying (and now even threatening to sue!) to continue to restrict the very access for the sake of which research is being given to publishers to be published -- in order to protect their current cost-recovery model from the hypothetical risk of one day having to convert to Gold OA Publishing.

Though the analogy is a bit shrill, it is very much as if tobacco companies were lobbying against no-smoking ordinances because they might hurt their sales (even though they protect public health) -- except that in the case of the no-smoking mandates, there isn't even Gold waiting at the end of the rainbow!

Drawn by Judith Economos
(feel free to use to promote OA and to bait "pit-bulls")


Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum