Dear all,
As these publication/copyright issues are central to our discussion, let me just draw your attention to the "Open access initiative" against the lobbys of publishers.
For those who don't know, this initiative is based on the observation that scientists do everything for free (paper writing, formatting, reviewing) while the publishers do very little for a lot of money. Then scientists have to pay huge amounts of money to get access to public scientific knowledge of theirs.
This publication business model is more and more questioned by the scientists. See http://www.zim.mpg.de/openaccess-berlin/berlindeclaration.html
Many big institutions (e.g. Cornell university and many others) have not renewed their membership to big digital libraries like Elsevier, or have reduced them drastically. This may be a concern for Springer too, or even IEEE and ACM at some point (though these are much cheaper, especially ACM).
The document below shows that in other fields (natural science, medicine), this philosophy is gaining strength, as some government-funded research now start to require that papers be available for free to the scientific community.
In our field, how would this impact the transfer of copyrights to IFIP (which actually means being bound to New Springer)? Many authors have already complained about this copyrights transfer, as they want to put a copy of their papers on their personal web page (and consequently on citeseer too...).
Best regards, Guy
Dear Open Access Supporter,
On September 3, 2004 the NIH posted for comment an "Enhanced Public Access Policy." This policy would require the recipients of NIH research grants to provide to the National Library of Medicine a digital copy of the final accepted manuscript (or the published version itself) of every published report resulting from NIH-funded research, so that the research results can be made freely available to scientists and the public through PubMed Central within six months of publication.
We are writing now to urge you to submit a comment in support of this proposal right away. The deadline for comments is just a few days away - November 16th.
The text of the proposal is available at: http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-04-064.html
You can post comments here: http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/public_access/add.htm
A powerful lobby of publishers and scientific societies is trying to block this plan. They claim that this is an unwarranted government intrusion on their business practices. In fact, the NIH policy has no authority over publishers
- its rules apply only to the scientists who
voluntarily accept grants from the NIH. The publishers remain free to operate their businesses as they always have and to compete in the free market to provide the best service and value to their authors and readers. But the publishers are wrong in arguing that they are entitled to monopoly control over access to the results of research that American taxpayers have paid for. On the contrary, the taxpayers who fund the research, and the scientists who carry it out, have every right to ask the grant recipients to provide open access to the published results. And they have every right to expect that the benefits of the research will be amplified by making it freely and widely available for others to use and to build on.
Let the NIH know that you support this policy proposal. Even better would be to tell the NIH that you would prefer an even stronger policy that requires full and immediate open access to all papers resulting from NIH-funded research. It is important that the NIH and other policymakers understand that this is not (as some publishers would have them believe) a radical proposal destined to destroy scientific publishing, but a thoughtful compromise that balances the desire for better access with the commercial interests of scientific publishers.
More information about the policy is available at http://www.nih.gov/about/publicaccess/index.htm http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/
Notable statements of support for the plan include:
An open letter to the US Congress signed by 25 Nobel Laureates: http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/bof.html
The Council of the National Academy of Sciences: http://www4.nationalacademies.org/news.nsf/isbn/s09162004?OpenDocument
Please let us know if you have any questions.
Harold Varmus Patrick Brown Michael Eisen