Thanks for outlining this. There are 300-400 people on the OSI list. I could not find: * any researchers * any doctors/medics * anyone from the Global South
But there are 9 directors from Elsevier. And everyone else is director of this, chief of that, CEO of the other. In the early days of OA in UK The https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-to-open-up-publicly-funded-research Finch Report invited the closed access publishers to help reform publishing. For many of us this was a a complete betrayal of the radicalism required. No wonder there has been to progress. That articles are priced at 3500 Euro. That 80% of the social distancing literature is behind a paywall. This mega committee is a repeat. It cannot reform. It will legitimise the next digital landgrab by the vested interests. There are publishers who create documents (Read Cube) that are specifically designed to make it impossible to re-use knowledge. And no one except a few of us care. m. The business model of megapublishers is to make it as hard as possible to read science. And then collect rent. In software the world works towards interoperable solutions ; in "publishing" we have 100+ competing groups who try as hard as possible to make universal knowledge available. In the coronavirus pandemic we need global knowledge. The person who does this without publisher control will be sued and possibly jailed. The only person who has liberated science will be jailed if she sets foot in USA. This is not fantasy. I have seen graduate students careers destroyed by publishers, with no support from their institutions. I myself have had pushback for text and data mining; I have had no practical support from anyone in the Academic system. Although they got the law changed to allow TDM, no Universities in UK dare do anything the publishers might frown on. I've been on and seen initiative after initiative. I've launched one (Panton Principles) - it probably actually made some difference to protect data before the publishers thought of grabbing it. But most inituiatives achieve nothing. And if they are stuffed with publishers all they do is increase the prices they charge for OA (like DEAL, PlanS and the rest). OA is just a way of milking the taxpayer. The only thing that will change this is building a better system with a fresh start, almost certainly with young radical people. And Coronavirus might just do that when citizens realize how badly they've been robbed. P. -- "I always retain copyright in my papers, and nothing in any contract I sign with any publisher will override that fact. You should do the same". Peter Murray-Rust Reader Emeritus in Molecular Informatics Unilever Centre, Dept. Of Chemistry University of Cambridge CB2 1EW, UK +44-1223-763069
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