Members of Britain's Royal Society have published an open letter telling the organization to stop campaigning against open access science publishing.
Last month, I blogged about how the Royal Society, a UK non-profit science organization and journal-publisher, had taken a stand against open-access publishing, an innovating approach to science publication that makes works available gratis under Creative Commons and comparable licenses.
The Royal Society's argument against open access were absurd: they argued that because open access publishing would undermine their ability to sell journals, that it would reduce researchers' access to scientific results. This was naked self-interest: the Royal Society equated access through their journals to access, period.
The open letter from the Society's members makes the eloquent case for Internet-based science publishing as a superior mechanism for distributing scientific research:
As working scientists who support open access to published research, we believe that the Society should support RCUK's proposal, rather than oppose it. The proposed RCUK policy will ensure that the results of research funded by the Research Councils are made freely and rapidly available, maximizing their utility not only to the scholarly community in the United Kingdom and around the world, but also to practitioners (including doctors and nurses) and to the British public whose taxes largely support the research. The RCUK policy has strong backing from librarians and academics, and has received official support3 from Universities UK, the organization that represents UK university vice-chancellors and principals.
In seeking to delay or even to block the proposed RCUK policy, the Royal Society appears to be putting the concerns of existing publishers (including the Society itself) ahead of the needs of science. The position statement ignores considerable evidence demonstrating the viability of open access, instead warning ominously of 'disastrous' consequences for science publishing. We believe that these concerns are mistaken.
(Thanks, JVC!)
Update:: A reader writes: "Lord Martin Rees, President of the Royal Society, responded to the members' letter last week. (Full text of his letter, Peter Suber's comments on what appears to be a delaying tactic by the RS.)
