Libraries Defend Open Access

aisaac writes:

Publisher plans to equate public access to federally funded research with government censorship and the destruction of peer review were exposed earlier this year (Nature, January 25, 2007). In an open letter last month, Rockefeller University Press castigated the Partnership for Research Integrity in Science & Medicine (PRISM) for using distortionary rhetoric in a coordinated PR attack on open access. Now the Association of Research Libraries has released an Issue Brief addressing this PR campaign in more detail. The Issue Brief exposes some of the distortions used to persuade key policy makers that recent gains open access scientific publishing pose a danger to peer reviewed scientific research, free markets, and possibly the future of western civilization. As an example of what the publishers backing PRISM hate, consider the the wonderfully successful grants policy of the National Institutes of Health, which requires papers based on grant-funded research to be published in PubMed Central.