Today’s Guardian has a piece by Graham Taylor, director of academic, educational and professional publishing at the Publishers Association, entitled Attacking publishers will not make open access any more sustainable . It’s such a crock that I felt compelled to respond point-by-point in the comments.

A previous post on this blog showed how the proportion of open access content in UKPMC was increasing. By open access, we mean “free to read AND free to reuse”, at least for non-commercial purposes, although all the content on UKPMC is free to read. At that time the trend reported showed that the proportion of open access content had grown to 33% in 2009.

My mind was blown yesterday by a tweet from Stuart Shieber: @bmcmatt: … and $585 to email a copy to a colleague. Someone (@maryannliebert) didn't get the memo on what "#openaccess" means.

No new SV-POW! post today — just a link to my new piece at the Guardian , US petition could tip the scales in favour of open access publishing. Pass it on — tell your friends — encourage them to sign the petition . It will make a real difference. Remember, open access is not just an issue for academics: it affects all our lives.

Good news! If you want to read research that was funded by the U.S. National Instututes of Health (NIH), you can. Their public access policy means that papers published on their dime become universally accessible in PubMed Central. Good news! If you want to read research that was funded by the Wellcome Trust, an international charitable foundation, you can.

[The title of this post is an allusion to Matt’s older post Authors versus publishers.] Following on from yesterday’s rant, I’m moved to write this one by Stephen Curry’s report on the latest Finch Committee meeting.

I just read this in a Times Higher Eduction report on David Willetts’s recent speech: Oh, so publishers “will not accept” Green OA? Where the hell do they get the arrogance to assume that a funding body needs their permission to say how their money is going to be spent?

Während über 11300 Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftler ihre Zusammenarbeit mit Elsevier kündigen (davon rund 700 aus Deutschland), die Fakultät für Mathematik der Technischen Universität München gar alle Elsevier-Zeitschriften  „[a]ufgrund unzumutbarer Kosten und Bezugsbedingungen“ abbestellt und die Universität Harvard das Motto „move prestige to open access“ vorgibt, startet mit PeerJ eine Open-Access-Publikationsplattform mit

The speed that things are happening at the moment is astonishing. Whenever we talk about the economics of open access — when I argue that it costs the community eight times as much to publish a paywalled article with Elsevier as it does to publish it as open access with PLoS ONE — I always hear the same argument in response.  And it’s a good argument.

Yesterday David Willetts, the UK Science and Universities Minister gave a speech to the Publishers Association that has got wide coverage. However it is worth pulling apart both the speech and the accompanying opinion piece from the Guardian because there are some interesting elements in there, and also some things have got a little confused. The first really key point is that there is nothing new here.