Below is the text of Wiley's statement about open access. I found it
interesting that Wiley claims that any requirement to make access free
constitutes a "taking" (paragraph four): this language basically amounts
to threatening legal action against any such requirement. It implies
that either such a requirement would be (1) illegal/unconstitutional or
(2) that it could only be allowed under the power of eminent domain, in
which case the government would have to compensate publishers for their
lost revenue.
Rich
--
Rich Heyman
Urban Studies Program
Department of Geography and the Environment
University of Texas at Austin
****WILEY STATEMENT*****
John Wiley& Sons (Wiley) is pleased to respond to OSTP’s December 9, 2009 Federal Register notice requesting comments on “Public Access Policies for Science and Technology Funding Agencies Across the Federal Government.” We appreciate the opportunity to participate in the Administration’s open consultation with all stakeholders who support the scientific research enterprise. Founded in 1807, Wiley is North America’s oldest independent publisher, and has a distinguished history as a literary, scientific, technical, medical, and scholarly publisher, serving researchers and practitioners in the US and around the world. Today, we employ approximately 2600 staff across the country and 5300 globally. We are one of the world’s foremost academic and professional publishers.
We publish over 1,500 scholarly peer-reviewed journals, and our online service Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com) provides electronic access to more than three million articles across these journals. Wiley-Blackwell is also the world’s largest society publisher, working in partnership with over 700 learned and scholarly societies that represent close to 1,000,000 members globally. Among them are the American Cancer Society (ACS), for which we publish Cancer, the flagship ACS journal; the Sigma Theta Tau International Honor Society of Nursing, with more than 120,000 members; and the American Anthropological Association, for which we publish 23 journals. Wiley supports the Open Government Directive issued by President Obama and Director Orszag’s December 2009 memorandum to the heads of executive departments and agencies.
The three principles outlined in those documents–transparency, participation, and collaboration– form the cornerstone of an open government. However, in creating an open government and a sustainable public access policy, it is critically important that these objectives be accomplished without damaging the private institutions on which the Government depends. To quote Dr. Kathryn Jones, President of the American Association of Anatomists and Professor at Loyola University Chicago’s Stritch School of Medicine, “there is no crisis in the world of scholarly publishing or in the dissemination of scientific materials. Unlike so many other issues faced by this Administration, there is no emergency to address.” Not only is there no crisis, there is no lack of public access to the scholarly peer-reviewed literature, including those works based on federally funded research activities. The combination of investments in digital and online technology (by publishers as well as others), and the formation of library consortia John Wiley& Sons—Public Access Policy Recommendations (January 2009) (assisted by publishers in many cases) around the country and the world, has accelerated and broadened access to the peer- reviewed literature by orders of magnitude. Publisher innovation and investment over the past 15 years has made this possible.
This public access, as all publishing, is a business underpinned by the copyright laws of the US and almost all other countries. However, in the vocabulary of many current anti-copyright activists, “public” is being conflated with “free.” Mandating such free access constitutes a taking. There is already a robust public access model for the dissemination of the peer reviewed results of taxpayer (and other) funded research. It is the global journal corpus. Agencies dispensing funds to support taxpayer funded research may wish to collect and publish free of charge reports generated by the recipients of those funds. However, those agencies have no rights to research reports written for and published by journals, nor is such a claim justified by an absence of access. It is clear from many of the comments submitted to this consultation that OSTP and the public recognize the value added provided by scholarly publishers to the scientific research community. This is most evident in the calls for public access to the final, publisher version of peer-reviewed articles (the ‘Version of Record’). There is no evidence that making the current broad public access to the journal literature free will improve research productivity or the public weal.
In his Memorandum, President Obama notes that “collaboration improves the effectiveness of Government by encouraging partnerships and cooperation within the Federal Government, across levels of government, and between Government and private institutions.” This is the most critical element of the Administration’s Open Government Directive and was the key element missing from NIH’s approach to shaping its public access policy. With little opportunity for the publishing community to provide substantive input, the NIH model was developed and implemented on the flawed premise that the free access benefit to researchers, practitioners, and the general public outweighs any harm that would result to scientific publishers.
Respectfully,
Eric A. Swanson
Senior Vice President, Wiley-Blackwell
John Wiley& Sons, Inc
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