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.

A very quick note to let you all know that my new article is now up at Discover Magazine‘s guest blog, The Crux.  Entitled It’s Not Academic: How Publishers Are Squelching Science Communication , the topic will not be unfamiliar to SV-POW! readers.

Folks, just a short post to let you know that, together with my colleagues in the @access Working Group, I have just launched a new web-site. One of the problems we have in promoting Open Access is getting non-scholars involved.  So the whole enterprise can feel like an ivory-tower issue, one that just doesn’t affect the great majority of people.  But that’s not true. The new site is called Who needs access?

An interesting conversation arose in the comments to Matt’s last post — interesting to me, at least, but then since I wrote much of it, I am biased.  I think it merits promotion to its own post, though.  Paul Graham, among many others, has written about how one of the most important reasons to write about a subject is that the process of doing so helps you work through exactly what you think about it.

Barrier-based publishers have been shouting and stomping around a lot recently.  Kind of like a Vogon guard.  But we’re trying to see the situation from their point of view.

… and that’s why we’re angry. (Note: exact percentages are made up.  But based on a true story.)

Understanding how a process looks from outside our own echo chamber can be useful. It helps to calibrate and sanity check our own responses. It adds an external perspective and at its best can save us from our own overly fixed ideas. In the case of the ongoing Elsevier Boycott we even have a perspective that comes from two opposed directions.

In a comment on the last post, an Elsevier employee wrote: Elsevier’s support for the Research Works Act comes down to a question of preferring voluntary partnerships to promote access to research, rather than being subjected to inflexible government mandates like the NIH policy, which seek to dictate how journal articles or accepted manuscripts are disseminated without involving publishers. While we do appreciate that you’re trying

Vom 24. bis 25. Januar  fand in Berlin die diesjährige “Academic Publishing in Europe” (APE) statt. Die Konferenz bot wie in den letzten Jahren einen interessanten Überblick über die heißen Themen der Verlagsbranche. Die Videoaufzeichnungen der Vorträge sind jetzt auf River Valley TV online. Persönlich fand ich insbesondere den Vortrag von Fred Dylla (AIP) interessant.

The Elsevier boycott at The Cost Of Knowledge is the most visible sign of the recent uprising against exploitative publishing practices, but it’s far from the only one.