Yesterday, David Willetts, the UK government’s Minister for Universities and Science, gave a speech at the annual general meeting of the Publisher’s Association.  The full text of the speech is online and very well worth reading, though it’s long.

This arrived in my inbox last week, but I’ve been too busy to blog about it until now. Not surprisingly, I have comments. First, this is huge news. I am certain that Taylor &

Item 1 : With his new piece at the Guardian,  “Persistent myths about open access scientific publishing”, Mike continues to be a thorn in the side of exploitative commercial publishers, who just can’t seem to keep their facts straight.

When my youngest brother was about eight years old, he quipped, “French fries: they may be high in fat, they may be high in cholesterol, but doggone it, they’re salty .” I often think about that in reference to barrier-based academic publishing. It doesn’t serve authors, it doesn’t serve readers, it doesn’t serve academic libraries, but doggone it, at least it costs vastly more than it should.

A quick note to remind everyone that although the RWA is dead, that only brings us back to the status quo.  At present, it’s still the case that the great majority of US government-funded research goes behind paywalls .  Although the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has a public access policy that is resulting in a lot of papers being posted for general access at PubMed Central, the NIH is only one of a dozen U.S.

Well, I’ve had most of the day now to digest the news that Elsevier have withdrawn their support of the Research Works Act; and a few hours to get used to the idea that the Act itself is now dead.  I’ve had some time to think about what it all means. My first reaction was to be really delighted: the banner headline suggested a genuine change of direction from Elsevier, such as I had challenged them about a few weeks ago.

Amazing, but it seems to be true: based on this statement on their own website, Elsevier has withdrawn its support for the Research Works Act! Could this be evidence that they really are listening?  Two weeks ago I publicly challenged Elsevier to do just this, as a first step towards winning back the support of authors, editors and reviewers who have been deserting them in droves.

The story so far As we all know by now, barrier-based publishers like Elsevier and Springer sometimes offer authors a choice to upgrade their papers to open access by payment of a fee: Elsevier calls this a “sponsored article“, Springer calls it “Open Choice“, and other publishers have other names for similar facilities.

Two weeks ago, Brian Kraatz and I attended one of Edward Tufte’s workshops on presenting data and information. I’ve been meaning to blog about that, and still plan to when I get time to breathe. But something came up then that has been stuck in my head ever since.

The current NIH public access policy requires self-archiving of accepted manuscripts in PubMed Central (“green open access”). The Research Works Act (RWA) is a bill which intends to end the NIH policy and to make it illegal for government agencies to establish similar policies.