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Re: UK select committee response to government on OA

Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2005 09:20:48 -0800
From: george@library.caltech.edu
To: E-Journals in Libraries Discussion <ARL-EJOURNAL@arl.org>
Resent-Subject: UK select committee response to government on OA

Forwarding from Open Access News.  -- George

The UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee has
issued its formal response (dated January 26, released February 1)
to the government's response [...]
I thank George Porter for forwarding my blog posting to the list. However, by unlucky chance, I never botched a blog posting as badly as I
botched that one. The new document is not the committee response to the
government, but another government response to the committee. I caught my
mistake soon after posting it and rewrote the note. Here's the rewrite:

The UK government released a new response (dated January 26, released
February 1) to the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee's
response (November 8, 2004) to the government's rejection of the
committee's report (July 20, 2004) on open access and STM publishing. Excerpt: 'The Government should be supporting the best and most cost
effective way possible to channel scientific outputs and at the moment it
is not demonstrable that the 'author pays' model is the better
system....DTI has not sought to neutralise the views of JISC....The
Government has not decided against the author-pays model, but does not
want to force a premature transition to a different system. To strongly
endorse or reject the author-pays approach would not be in the interests
of allowing the market itself to evolve to meet the needs of authors and
the wider academic community....The Government recognises the potential
benefits of Institutional Repositories and sees them as a significant
development worthy of encouragement. But it believes that each Institution
has to make its own decision about Institutional Repositories depending on
individual circumstances.'

(PS: This response suffers from the same problems as the government's
November response. First, it focuses more on OA journals than OA
repositories, when the committee report did the reverse. Second, it
dismisses the primary recommendation --for mandated OA for taxpayer-funded
research through OA repositories-- without addressing the committee's
evidence and arguments. In November the committee criticized the
government for precisely these two failings, and in this response the
government is repeating them.)

http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2005_01_30_fosblogarchive.html#a110727293861171630

Peter Suber
Open Access Project Director, Public Knowledge
Research Professor of Philosophy, Earlham College
Author, SPARC Open Access Newsletter
Editor, Open Access News blog
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/
peter.suber@earlham.edu