Re: The UK report, press coverage, and the Green and Gold Roads toOpen Access

[Stevan Harnad <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk>]

The press just keeps on missing the mark!

"American and British Lawmakers Endorse Open-Access Publishing" 
Andrea Foster and Lila Guterman 
Chronicle of Higher Education, July 30, 2004
http://chronicle.com/prm/weekly/v50/i47/47a01302.htm

>    "In a double coup for the open-access movement this month,
>    committees of the U.S. Congress and British Parliament recommended
>    that papers resulting from government-financed research be made
>    available free. The committees recommended that the U.S. and British
>    governments require researchers to deposit in free, online archives
>    any articles that arise from research sponsored, respectively,
>    by the National Institutes of Health and any British agency. 

So far, so good. That part was correct. But then:

>    The British committee further recommended that journal publishers
>    adopt an open-access model in which authors would pay to publish
>    and subscription fees would be eliminated. Both governments are
>    expected to act on the committees' recommendations this year."

No, the British committee did not recommend that; on the contrary, they
explicitly refrained from recommending it and recommended only further
experimentation with it, along with funding to help pay
author-institutions costs for OA Publishing.

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/39903.htm

Nor is the title of the story correct:

"American and British Lawmakers Endorse Open-Access Publishing"

"Endorsement" is ambiguous. What, if anything, both the Americans and the
British endorsed was Open Access (OA), not OA Publishing. They recommended
mandating OA *Provision* through author/institution self-archiving of
published articles (the "green" road to OA), not OA Publishing (the golden
road to OA).

Stevan Harnad