[Oa-italia] polemica fra le University Press americane sull'OA

[Susanna Mornati]

Inoltro un frammento della discussione che gira sulle liste 
internazionali a proposito della proposta di legge per impedire ai 
NIH di rendere obbligatorio l'accesso aperto alle pubblicazioni da 
loro finanziate. In particolare Mike Rossner, direttore della 
Rockefeller University Press, sostiene che da quando ha adottato 
l'Open Access i guadagni sono aumentati. Un'altra testimonianza di 
questo fatto.

Saluti,
Susanna Mornati


>From: Mike Rossner <rossner a mail.rockefeller.edu>
>To: liblicense-l a lists.yale.edu
>Subject: Re: New US Bill re. Copyright/Federal Funding
>Date: Wed, 24 Sep 2008 18:40:19 EDT
>
>Pasted below is a letter sent to Peter Givler, Executive Director
>of The Association of American University Presses, in response to
>his <http://aaupnet.org/aboutup/issues/letterFCRWA.pdf> support
>of the recent Fair Copyright in Research Works Act.  The exchange
>has been
><http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/09/rockefeller-up-disavows-aaup-support.html>blogged 
>
>by Peter Suber.
>
>September 23, 2008
>
>Peter Givler
>Executive Director
>Association of American University Presses
>
>Dear Peter,
>
>I am writing to take issue with your letter of September 10th,
>supporting the Fair Copyright in Research Works Act, which seeks
>to overturn the mandate on public access to NIH funded research.
>I would be grateful if you could let your member presses know on
>what basis you claim to speak on their behalf.  We deserve an
>accounting of how many member presses are indeed affected by the
>NIH mandate (that is, how many publish research articles
>resulting from NIH funded research), how many of those presses
>were consulted, and how many of them supported your efforts to
>overturn the mandate.  Without this information you are replaying
>the PRISM fiasco of the AAP - a lobbying effort that no-one would
>admit to supporting.
>
>The Rockefeller University Press, as a member organization of the
>AAUP, strongly opposes your efforts to overturn the NIH mandate.
>In your letter you claim that "Copyright is the legal foundation
>that permits recovery of [our] costs and investment in publishing
>new work.  Weakening copyright protection through federal
>mandates that publications resulting from government-funded
>research be made freely available undermines that foundation and
>threatens the very system that makes such work of high value in
>the first place."  However, you do not provide any data to back
>up this statement.  We at the Rockefeller University Press have
>the data to show that this is not true.  We have released our
>content to the public 6 months after publication since January,
>2001, but our revenues have grown every year since then.  In May
>of this year, we took the additional step of allowing authors to
>retain copyright and distribution rights to the articles
>published in our journals.  Third parties can use all of our
>content under a modified Creative Commons License: see
>http://www.jcb.org/misc/terms.shtml. I do not anticipate that
>these new policies will affect our revenues.
>
>I fully understand the value added by publishers.  However, our
>authors create the works we publish and should thus have rights
>over their distribution.  The public pays for NIH-funded work and
>should thus have access to the results.  The problem here is not
>the government trying to usurp publishers' rights, but the fact
>that publishers have for so long usurped these rights from
>authors and the public.
>
>Yours sincerely,
>Mike Rossner
>
>
>Mike Rossner, Ph.D.
>Executive Director
>The Rockefeller University Press
>New York, NY 10065
>skype: mike_rossner
>www.rockefeller.edu/rupress


Susanna Mornati, CILEA
Project Leader AEPIC, www.aepic.it
+39 02 2699 5322, +39 348 7090 226,
mailto:mornati a cilea.it, skype: susanna.mornati

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