One small point - I don't suppose there's any chance they could change the acronym? COPE is pretty well established as the Committee On Publication Ethics?
Alan -----Original Message----- From: Heather Morrison [mailto:hgmor...@sfu.ca] Sent: 18 September 2009 05:12 To: American Scientist Open Access Forum; sparc-oafo...@arl.org; scholc...@ala.org; eri...@listserv.binghamton.edu Subject: Compact for Open Access Publishing Equity: key to transitioning to open access Kudos to Cornell, Harvard, Dartmouth, MIT, and the University of California at Berkeley for initiative the Compact for Open Access Publishing Equity (COPE). Details can be found here: http://www.oacompact.org/ COPE is a key initiative in the transition to open access. Signatories are asked to make a commitment to provide support for open access publishing that is equitable to the support currently provided to journals through subscriptions. One of the reasons COPE is key is simply the recognition that universities (largely through libraries) are the support system for scholarly communication. Scholarly publishing is not a straightforward business transaction where one side produces goods and the other purchases them. Rather, it is university faculty who do the research, writing, reviewing, and often the editing, often on time and in space provided by the universities. Scholarly publishing is a service, rather than a good. Once we understand that academic library budgets are the support for scholarly communication, it is much easier to see that we should be prioritizing supports that make sense for scholarly communication into the future, and equity for open access publishing is a great beginning. Best wishes to COPE. I encourage every library and university to join. There is no immediate financial commitment required, rather a commitment to develop models for equity. Supporting transition to gold OA, in my opinion, in no way diminishes the importance of green OA. There are good reasons for pursuing both strategies, both in the short and the long term. Heather Morrison, MLIS The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com