Report: “Academic Publishers Threatened By Open-Access Expansion”

From Inside Higher Ed:

Even as federal agencies work to implement the Nelson memo—a 2022 White House directive to make federally funded research freely available to the public immediately after publication—members of Congress are joining academic publishers in pushing back.

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“Researchers should have the right to choose how and where they publish or communicate their research and should not be forced to disseminate their research in ways or under licenses that could harm its integrity or lead to its modification without their express consent,” the Senate and House Appropriations Committees both wrote in reports attached to their draft budget bills, which passed out of committee earlier this summer.

Carl Maxwell, vice president of public policy for the Association of American Publishers (AAP), said in an email to Inside Higher Ed that the organization applauds Congress’s latest efforts to scrutinize the Nelson memo and “protect the right of authors to determine how the articles, books, and reports they have written are licensed.”

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Currently, the academic publishing industry’s business model relies largely on an author’s willingness to submit work for free—or even pay to publish it—and the publisher’s ability to turn around and sell that research to academic libraries through expensive journal subscriptions. Libraries at doctoral-granting institutions spend about 80 percent of their materials budgets on such subscriptions, according to data from the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), which supports expanding open access of federally funded research and the federal purpose license.

“We don’t have any concerns about agencies limiting authors’ control over their works,” said Katherine Klosek, ARL’s director of information policy and federal relations. “These are nonexclusive licenses that authors are granting to agencies to use their work, so authors can retain those rights and choose to publish wherever they like in addition to complying with public access policies.”

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Filed under: Academic Libraries, Associations and Organizations, Companies (Publishers/Vendors), Data Files, Libraries, News, Open Access, Publishing, Reports