125 Provosts for and 10 Against the FRPAA Self-Archiving Mandate

From: Stevan Harnad <harnad_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2006 19:32:29 +0100

    ------------------------------------------------------------------
    SUMMARY: The actual impact of Open Access (OA) self-archiving on
    research, researchers, their institutions, their funders, and the
    tax-paying public (which has already been shown to be highly positive)
    must be clearly separated from any hypothetical impact it might have
    on publishers (whether commercial or scholarly-society publishers).
    Researchers do not conduct research -- nor does the tax-paying
    public fund research -- for the benefit of publishers. The sole
    point at issue concerning the FRPAA is whether or not self-archiving
    should be mandated. The two concrete questions that researchers,
    their institutions and funders need to put to themselves regarding
    any "special relationship" with scholarly society publishers are
    therefore:

        (a) Would (or should) researchers, their institutions and their
        funders knowingly choose to subsidise their scholarly societies
        with their own actual lost research impact in order to immunise
        their scholarly societies from their hypothetical fears of lost
        subscription revenue?

        (b) If, contrary to all evidence to date, self-archiving were
        indeed one day to cause publisher revenue losses -- or even
        to force a shift to the open-access publishing cost-recovery
        model (with author-institutions paying the publication costs
        for their own institution's research output out of their own
        windfall savings from the cancellation of their former costs
        as user-institutions, buying in the published output of other
        institutions) -- is the prevention of that hypothetical outcome
        something that researchers, their institutions and their funders
        would (or should) knowingly choose to subsidise with their own
        actual lost research impact?

    A dissenting minority of 10 US provosts opposes the FRPAA
    Self-Archiving Mandate (vs. 125 in favor) on these grounds. There
    is obviously a biomedical publisher lobby behind some or all of the
    10 dissenting voices; the arguments are old ones, already rebutted
    many times:

        (1) The hypothesis that mandated self-archiving will force a shift
        to the OA publishing cost-recovery model is pure speculation at
        this time, with no evidence in its support, and evidence from
        both the American Physical Society and IOPP contradicting it.

        (2) But even if the hypothesis were ever to come to pass,
        it would not mean "diminishing funds available for research
        to benefit the public good".

        (3) To force a shift to the OA publishing cost-recovery model,
        there would first have to be substantial revenue losses for
        publishers, from institutional subscription cancellations.

        (4) But for every penny of revenue lost by publishers in the form
        of institutional subscription cancellations, there has to be a
        penny saved by institutions, in the form of windfall savings.

        (5) Hence if publisher revenue losses were ever to force a shift
        to the OA cost-recovery model, the institutions would have a
        large annual pot of windfall savings on which to draw to pay for
        their own outgoing publication costs.

        (6) Hence there would be nothing at all "requiring authors to pay
        for their publications through their Federal grants, diminishing
        funds available for research to benefit the public good."

        (7) It is only now -- when there are neither any institutional
        subscription cancellation pressures, nor any institutional
        subscription windfall savings -- that it looks as if paying OA
        publishing costs would require diverting money from research.

        (8) Hence it is both self-serving and self-contradictory to
        invoke both the "damage" hypothesis and the "research fund
        diversion" hypothesis against the FRPAA in the same breath:
        If the hypothetical "damage" is the hypothetical subscription
        revenue loss, then that is also the diversion: no need to poach
        hypothetical research funds.

        (9) The rationale for the FRPAA self-archiving mandate, however,
        has nothing to do with speculative hypothesizing about journal
        economics but with demonstrable facts about maximizing research
        usage and impact.
    --------------------------------------------------------------------

Peter Suber has already provided an excellent critique of the letter
from a dissenting minority of 10 US provosts who oppose the proposed
FRPAA Self-Archiving Mandate (versus the other 125 provosts who support
it):

http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2006_09_17_fosblogarchive.html#115895278601760136

But one can never say enough in support of a good thing (and against a
bad one!), so what follows below is a detailed, systematic,
point-by-point critique of the dissenting provosts' position and the
arguments adduced in its support.

It is fairly obvious that there is a biomedical publisher lobby behind
some or all of these dissenting voices, since the statements of these 10
dissenting provosts (several of them members of executive committees of
the American Physiological Society!) are almost a verbatim echo of the
very same points that the publishing lobby has been making over and
over, in trying to oppose self-archiving mandates worldwide:
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/4198.html
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/5378.html
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/5398.html
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/4175.html
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/4149.html

hence the accompanying press release from the American Physiological Society
(not to be confused with the American Physical Society! from which more
will be heard below too):
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/author.html#4078
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Author.Eprint.Archives/subject.html#6
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/subject.html#472

(The attempted opposition to self-archiving mandates has already proven
unsuccessful in the UK, where four of eight RCUK research funding
councils have already mandated self-archiving, beginning October 1
2006.)
    http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/access/index.asp

But never mind, we will take the points made in both the American
Physiological Society press release and the letter from the 10 provosts
at face value:

On Fri, 22 Sep 2006, Martin Frank (American Physiological Society) wrote:

> FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
> Contact: Christine Guilfoy 301-634-7253 (office)
> cguilfoy_at_the-aps.org
> Martin Frank, Ph.D. 301-634-7118
> mfrank_at_the-aps.org

 SENIOR ACADEMIC OFFICERS EXPRESS THEIR CONCERN ABOUT S.2695, THE
 "FEDERAL RESEARCH PUBLIC ACCESS ACT OF 2006"

 (Bethesda, MD) - September 22, 2006 - Senior academic officers
 from 10 institutions issued a letter to Senators John Cornyn (TX)
 and Joseph Lieberman (CT) expressing their concerns about the
 provisions of S.2695, the "Federal Research Public Access Act of
 2006." These institutions, which collectively make nearly $3
 billion in annual research investments, expressed their concerns
 that mandating a six-month public release of journal articles
 would negatively impact the academic community and the publishers
 that disseminate their work.

(If the $3 billion dollar figure is pertinent at all, then the first
thing to call to mind is the more than $30 billion dollars in annual
research investments of the 125 institutions that had expressed exactly
the opposite concern...)
    http://www.arl.org/sparc/advocacy/frpaa/institutions.html

But let us look at this more closely, for on the face of it, the effect
of making research Open Access has already been demonstrated to have a
highly *positive* impact on its impact (sic) -- i.e., the degree to which it
is accessed, used, and cited.
    http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html

So now let us hear more about the alleged downside of this -- but let us
be very careful to separate its actual impact on the *academic community*
(which we already know to be positive) from its hypothetical impact on
(some) *publishers*.

For, lest we forget it: researchers do not conduct research -- nor does
the tax-paying public fund research -- for the benefit of publishers.
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/4675.html
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/subject.html#4755
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/4932.html
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/4675.html

> In signing the letter in opposition to S.2695, Dr. Robert Rich,
> Senior Vice President and Dean, University of Alabama at
> Birmingham School of Medicine, expressed his concern that "the
> legislation would damage the special relationship between
> scholarly societies and academic communities who work in
> partnership to ensure that these communities are sustained and
> extended, science is advanced, research meets the highest
> standards, and patient care is enhanced with accurate and timely
> information."

The sole point at issue with the FRPAA is whether or not self-archiving
should be mandated. All evidence so far shows that self-archiving
enhances research impact. No evidence so far shows that self-archiving
reduces scholarly society publisher revenues, and this has been
explicitly confirmed by the two scholarly society publishers whose
published contents have been self-archived the longest and the most, the
American Physical Society and the Institute of Physics Publishing: They
both report that they have detected no subscription losses as a
consequence of self-archiving.
    http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11006/

Nevertheless, some scholarly society publishers fear, despite the
absence of any actual evidence, that self-archiving will cause "damage"
if mandated by the FRPAA (and by other research funders and institutions
worldwide). No one knows whether or when these fears of damage will
actually come true, but let us agree that there is a non-zero risk for
publisher subscription revenues here, and that it is definitely not
outside the bounds of either logic or likelihood that universal
availability of authors' final drafts could eventually generate
cancellation pressure on subscriptions. Yet what needs to be done by the
academic community, is to weigh this hypothetical risk to publishers
subscription revenues against the demonstrated benefits to the research
impact of researchers, their institutions, their funders, and the
tax-paying public that funds them.

Hence there are two very concrete questions that researchers and their
institutions and funders need to put to themselves regarding this
"special relationship" with scholarly society publishers:

    (i) Would researchers, their institutions and their funders like
    to subsidise their scholarly societies with their own actual lost
    research impact in order to immunise their scholarly societies from
    their hypothetical fears of damage?

    (ii) If, contrary to all evidence to date, self-archiving were one
    day to cause revenue loss to publishers after all -- or even induce
    a conversion to the open-access publishing cost-recovery model
    (with author-institutions paying the publication costs for their
    own research output out of their own windfall savings from the
    cancellation of their former costs as user-institutions, buying in
    the published output of other institutions) -- is the prevention
    of *that* hypothetical outcome something that researchers, their
    institutions and their funders would like to subsidise with their
    own actual lost research impact?

> Rich also expressed concern that "S.2695 would
> divert scarce Federal dollars away from research in order to
> provide a service already provided to the public by society
> publishers."

 It is already a speculative hypothesis that self-archiving would damage
subscription revenue; but it is *wildly* counterfactual to say that FRPAA
is about diverting funds away from research in order to pay publishers!

FRPAA is not a mandate to convert to OA publishing: it is a mandate to
convert to author self-archiving. FRPAA says nothing about diverting
funding from research to publication.

The hypothetical long-term sequel of mandated self-archiving -- a
conversion from institutional subscription-charges to institutional
publication charges -- is merely speculation, in the absence of any
objective supporting evidence (and in the face of counter-evidence). But
even if the hypothesis were ever to prove true, it would not mean
diverting a penny of research money from research funding to publication
costs! It would mean redirecting the very same money that institutions
currently spend on subscription charges toward paying instead for
publication charges.

> The nonprofit publishers comprising the DC Principles Coalition
> (http://www.DCPrinciples.org) are among those who are able to provide
> public access to literature either immediately or within months of
> publication without government mandate through corporate and academic
> subscriptions.

This is playing loose with the words "public access." The purpose of an
Open Access self-archiving mandate is to provide access to all those
would-be users who do *not* have subscription access, today. Voluntary
provision of OA by publishers is of course very welcome, but it is far
too few and far between. And the research impact loss problem is *now*,
and urgent.

It would be absurd for the research community to continue sustaining
needless annual impact losses in order to wait passively for publisher
voluntarism to decide whether and when to remedy them. If publisher
voluntarism were indeed inclined to put an end to those impact losses,
surely publishers would not be lobbying *against* the FRPAA self-archiving
mandate: they would be supporting it: The distributed author mandate
would be saving them the trouble of having to provide OA themselves,
from their own resources!

But it is clearly for access-denial, not access-provision, that (some)
publishers are lobbying here. Let there be no doubt about that, and that
the voluntarism of the DC Principles Coalition is far too little, too
late.
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3689.html

> According to Martin Frank, Ph.D., Executive Director of the American
> Physiological Society (APS) and a member of the Coalition, "a six-month
> release mandate may force some journals to shift to a publication model
> requiring authors to pay for their publications through their Federal
> grants, diminishing funds available for research to benefit the public
> good."
> Martin Frank, Ph.D.
> Executive Director, American Physiological Society
> 9650 Rockville Pike, Bethesda, MD 20814-3991 USA
> http://www.the-aps.org

(1) As noted, this hypothesis -- that mandated self-archiving will cause
a conversion to the OA publishing cost-recovery model -- is pure
speculation at this time, with no evidence in its support, and the
prominent evidence from both the American Physical Society and IOPP
contradicting it.

(2) But let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that the hypothesis
should one day come to pass: does this mean "diminishing funds available
for research to benefit the public good"?

(3) What Martin Frank seems to be forgetting in his calculations is that
in order to force a shift to the OA publishing cost-recovery model,
there first have to be *substantial revenue losses* for publishers, from
institutional subscription cancellations.

(4) But for every single penny of revenue lost by publishers in the form
of institutional subscription cancellations, there has to be a penny
saved by institutions, in the form of windfall savings.

(5) Hence if publisher revenue losses were ever indeed to force a shift
to the OA cost-recovery model, the institutions would have a large
annual pot of windfall savings from incoming subscription cancellations
upon which to draw, in order to begin paying instead for their own
outgoing publication costs.

(6) Hence there would be nothing at all "requiring authors to pay for
their publications through their Federal grants, diminishing funds
available for research to benefit the public good."

(7) The only thing that would have happened would be the augmentation of
the public good derived from research, by maximising its access, usage
and impact -- whether or not the hypothetical shift in publish models
came to pass.

(8) It is only now -- when there are neither any institutional
subscription cancellation pressures, nor any institutional subscription
windfall savings -- that it looks as if paying OA publishing costs would
require diverting money form research.

(9) Hence it is both self-serving and self-contradictory to float both
the "damage" hypothesis and the "research fund diversion" hypothesis in
the same breath: If the "damage" is subscription revenue loss, then that
is also the diversion: no need to poach research funds!

> Issued on September 22, 2006, the letter reads:
>
> Dear Senators Cornyn and Lieberman:
>
> The undersigned senior academic officers write to express our
> concerns about S.2695, the "Federal Research Public Access Act of
> 2006."
>
> We agree that the broadest dissemination of scientific literature
> is good for research.

If this were indeed clearly thought-through and sincerely meant, we
could stop right here. Because "the broadest dissemination of scientific
literature" is Open Access, and the FRPAA self-archiving mandate will
provide Open Access.

> However, mandating a six-month public
> release of journal articles would have negative unintended
> consequences for the academic community.

Are these hypothetical negative unintended consequences negative for the
academic community (i.e., researchers and their institutions and users),
or for the publishing community? (The two are completely conflated in
what follows below.)

> The free posting of unedited author manuscripts by government agencies
> [1] threatens the integrity of the scientific record, [2] potentially
> undermines the publisher peer review process, and [3] is not a smart
> use of funds that could be better used for research.

(0) The posting is by authors, not by government agencies: the FRPAA
proposal is for the government agencies to mandate that the authors post
the manuscripts.

(1) How does posting a free final, peer-reviewed, accepted draft of the
author's paper for those would-be users webwide who cannot afford access
to the publisher's version of record "threaten the integrity of the
scientific record"?

(2) What the FRPAA proposes to require to post is the author's final,
peer-reviewed draft, accepted for publication; the only thing it might
be missing is some copy-editing: How does that "undermine the publisher
peer review process"?

(3) And is it, then, smarter use of funds to subsidise copy-editing with
lost research impact?

If copy-editing is such an important added-value, what are publishers
worried about? The subscription smart-money will then just keep on
paying for it, since that added-value is missing from the author's
peer-reviewed final draft, which is merely a supplement for those who
cannot afford the publisher's official copy-edited version of record,
online or on paper.

(But please let's leave the "peer review process" out of this, because
it is not even at issue. The peers review for free, as a service to both
authors and publishers; their services are not what the subscription
money is being spent on.)

> Scientific publishers, in collaboration with academic
> institutions, scientists, and libraries, have been at the
> forefront of innovations that have improved and continue to
> improve access to research information. As a result, more
> scientific papers are now available to more people than at any
> time in history.

Absolutely true, and commendable, but irrelevant. Because it is not
enough. Substantial amounts of potential research impact are still being
needlessly lost, cumulatively, in an online age when this loss can
easily be prevented, once and for all, at long last.

The supplementary self-archived author's draft is for all those would-be
users whose institutions cannot afford the above-mentioned "innovations
and improvements." For without the author's self-archived version, they
have *no* access at all.

For an estimate of how many users are being denied access -- and hence
how many authors are being denied impact -- simply look at the studies
thay show the degree to which self-archiving enhances article usage and
impact.
http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html

> Even when federal funds support the research reported in journal
> articles, these funds do not cover the costs associated with
> turning raw data into archived scientific manuscripts. The cost
> of peer review, copy editing, formatting, printing, online
> publication, search engine development, and permanent archiving
> ranges from $2,500 - $10,000 per article.

Even without challenging those figures, one can point out that all those
costs are currently being paid, in full, by subscriptions, with no
evidence that self-archiving reduces those subscriptions. If and when
self-archiving should ever reduce those subscriptions enough to require
another way of meeting those costs, the costs will be met out of the
windfall subscription savings.

But for now, this is mere speculation. The only thing that is not
speculation is the demonstrated benefits of OA self-archiving to
research and researchers, in enhancing research usage and impact.

Nor -- as long as we are speculating -- is it at all clear that if
self-archiving were indeed ever to induce subscription cancellations,
that "the cost of peer review, copy editing, formatting, printing,
online publication, search engine development, and permanent archiving
[$2,500 - $10,000 per article]" would all prove irreducible:

It is not only hypothetically possible but quite likely that the cost of
implementing peer review [since the peers review for free] could turn
out to be the only essential remaining publication cost, and that is
only about $500 per article.

The value of copy editing remains to be determined empirically, but
formatting, printing, online publication, search engine development, and
permanent archiving look very much like the kinds of things that could
readily be offloaded onto authors and their institutions, with their
distributed network of OA IRs and their distributed and hence much
diluted costs per article, nowhere near the current $2,500 - $10,000
figure.

   "The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review)" (Jul 1999)
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/subject.html#304

    "Hypothetical Sequel"
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/399we152.htm

The above is of course all just speculation too, but hypothetical
speculation invariably breeds counterspeculation. The only certainty
here is that mandated OA self-archiving will be highly beneficial to
research usage and impact, as has already been repeatedly demonstrated
empirically.

> At present, publishers cover these publication costs through the
> sale of subscriptions. A Federal policy mandating public access
> after six months would threaten the financial viability of many
> of these journals through the loss of subscription revenues,
> forcing them to identify other means to cover costs.

First, to repeat: There is no evidence to date that this hypothesis is
correct, even in fields that have been self-archiving at 100% for years
now.

But should the hypothesis ever prove true, then, yes, it will be
necessary to "identify other means to cover costs" (whatever those
irreducible costs turn out to be). And the other means of covering those
costs is already obvious: Author-institution payment of publishing costs
out of institutions' own windfall subscription savings.

Even without cost-cutting and new efficiencies (such as phasing out the
paper edition and relying on the worldwide network of OA IRs to provide
access, hence leaving only the cost of implementing the peer review
service), a forced shift to the OA publishing cost-recovery model *after*
100% OA had already been reached via mandated self-archiving would merely
mean that the money that currently changes hands between institutions
and publishers in the form of subscription costs would instead change
hands between institutions and publishers in the form of publishing costs.

Note, though, that no matter how shrilly one raises the volume on the
hypothesizing and counter-hypothesizing, it is still merely a
speculation that mandated self-archiving will force a shift in
publishing models. The only objective certainty is that mandated
self-archiving will greatly benefit research impact.

> One such means is to shift the costs to the scientists/authors.
> This is the business model currently used by the Public Library
> of Science, for example, which recently increased fees to $2,500
> per manuscript. These fees either come from [1] the author's Federal
> research grant -- thereby decreasing the amount available for
> research -- or [2] from the university, which could ultimately lead to
> higher institutional costs than those needed for journal
> subscriptions.

PLoS and other OA publishers today are struggling to make ends meet in a
world where spontaneous OA self-archiving is still only hovering at 15%,
and 100% of institutional journal budgets are still tied up in covering
subscription costs. Hence these brave new OA publishers need to find
other sources to pay their OA publishing costs.

But on the above hypothetical scenario, a forced shift to OA publishing
caused by mandated self-archiving would result from institutional
subscription cancellations! Hence the institutions could then use their
own windfall savings to pay the irreducible costs in another way: via
the OA publishing model. No need to poach from either research funding
(1) or other institutional resources (2).

> In fact, some studies have already shown that research intensive
> universities would have to pay considerably more to gain access
> to the same amount of research under an author-pays model than a
> subscription model.

This is compounding speculation with speculation, since no one knows
what the true costs would turn out to be, under pressure from
subscription revenue declining to unsustainable levels because of
institutional cancellations.

There is clearly more than enough money in the system already to sustain
publication today. Research-intensive universities are also
subscription-intensive universities, so one would have to see just what
assumptions are being made by studies that claim that these universities
would be worse off if there were ever a transition to OA publishing.

The only thing that is sure is that all research institutions would be
far better off in terms of their own research impact (and access). The
rest is all speculation, assumptions, and guesstimation.

> Mandating free dissemination of scientific manuscripts within six
> months would significantly limit the ability of non-profit and
> commercial publishers to cover the upfront reviewing, editing,
> and production costs of creating these manuscripts. Some
> journals would simply cease to exist. Others would be much less
> able to support innovation in scientific publishing and
> archiving. Ultimately, this could lead to a system in which NIH
> and other federal agencies must sustain a significant portion of
> the research publishing enterprise, maintaining 100+ years of
> archival journals, as well as producing new research articles.

Not only is this merely a shriller version of the speculative scenario
already mooted above, at a still higher volume, but it throws in a
nonsensical and irrelevant alarum about legacy archiving, something that
is not even at issue in the FRPAA self-archiving mandate, which only
covers prospective author self-archiving, not retrospective journal
archiving. (Let the journals hand over their legacy archives, and I'm
sure the research and funder community will know what to do about them:
don't fret about the cost...)

On the coverage of the prospective costs if/when subscriptions should
become unsustainable, the obvious answer remains the same: institutions
will cover those costs out of their own subscription savings.

> As a member of the Senate Budget Committee, you are certainly
> sensitive to the various forces that shape and reshape the
> Federal budget from year to year. Recently, for example, we
> learned that the Biomolecular Interaction Network Database -- the
> world's largest free repository for proteomic data -- lost its
> funding and curtailed its curation efforts. As leaders in our
> respective academic institutions, we are profoundly concerned
> that one unintended consequence of S. 2695 would be to put both
> our current research publications and our research archives in
> jeopardy.

The FRPAA self-archiving mandate devolves on the distributed network of
institutional repositories (IRs) of all the US research institutions. In
the unlikely event that someone would ever want to pull the plug on a
major central repository such as PubMed Central, the primary research
providers, the universities themselves, are certainly likely to become
more and more reliant on the IRs, rather than less and less, in our
distributed online, networked age. And the costs of creating and
maintaining individual OA IRs are so risibly low that it is absurd even
to discuss them.

So the obvious and optimal prophylaxis against any risk of central
funding loss for central archives is for researchers to do all their
self-archiving locally, in their own institution's IR, and let central
collections be harvests from those IRs, rather a locus for direct
central self-archiving.

    "Central vs. Distributed Archives" (began Jun 1999)
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/subject.html#0294

    "PubMed and self-archiving" (began Aug 2003)
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/subject.html#2974

    "Central versus institutional self-archiving" (began Nov 2003)
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/subject.html#3206

    "Harold Varmus: 'Self-Archiving is Not Open Access'" (began June 2006)
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/5389.html

> Given the widespread access to the scientific literature that
> already exists and the negative unintended consequences this bill
> will have on the academic community, we urge you to reconsider
> whether S.2695 is needed.

Translation: Based on our evidence-free and counter-evidential
speculations about risk to publishers, we urge you to renounce the
demonstrated benefits to research, researchers, and the tax-paying
public that funds them.

> Thank you for considering our request.
>
> Sincerely yours,
>
> Robert R. Rich, MD, Senior Vice President and Dean, University of
> Alabama at Birmingham School of Medicine, Birmingham, AL
>
> Richard P. Saller, Ph.D., Provost, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL
>
> John R. Sladek, Jr., Ph.D., Vice Chancellor, Research, University
> of Colorado Health Sciences Center, Denver, CO
>
> Kenneth L. Barker, Ph.D., Provost and Vice President for
> Research, SUNY Upstate Medical University, Syracuse, NY
>
> Mary J.C. Hendrix, Ph.D., President & Scientific Director,
> Children's Memorial Research Center, Northwestern University
> Feinberg School of Medicine, Chicago, IL
>
> Bruce A. Holm, Ph.D., Senior Vice Provost, SUNY at Buffalo and
> Executive Director, NYS Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics &
> Life Sciences, Buffalo, NY
>
> Leonard R. Johnson, Ph.D., Vice Chancellor for Research,
> University of Tennessee Health Science Center, Memphis, TN=20
>
> Barbara A. Horwitz, Ph.D., Vice Provost-Academic Personnel,
> University of California, Davis, CA
>
> Richard J. Traystman, Ph.D., Associate Vice President for
> Research, Planning, and Development, Associate Dean for Basic
> Science Research, Oregon Health and Sciences University,
> Portland, OR
>
> David E. Millhorn, Ph.D., Vice President, Office of Research and
> Economic Development, University of Tennessee System, Knoxville,
> TN
>
> About the DC Principles Coalition for Free Access
>
>
> The DC Principles for Free Access to Science Coalition
> (http://www.dcprinciples.org/) represents more than 75 of the
> nation's leading nonprofit medical and scientific societies and
> publishers. The not-for-profit publishers are committed to
> working in partnership with scholarly communities such as
> libraries to ensure that these communities are sustained, science
> is advanced, research meets the highest standards, and patient
> care is enhanced with accurate and timely information.

As noted above, it would be absurd for the research community to keep
sustaining its needless annual impact losses and just sit waiting
passively for publisher voluntarism to decide whether and when to remedy
them: The voluntarism of the DC Principles Coalition is far too little,
too late.

Stevan Harnad
Received on Mon Sep 25 2006 - 22:06:47 BST

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