[Forwarding from Mike Rossner, Executive Director of the Rockefeller University Press. --Peter Suber.]
March 31, 2010 The Honorable Bart Gordon Chairman Committee on Science and Technology U.S. House of Representatives Rayburn House Office Building 2306 Washington, D.C. 20515-4306 Dear Chairman Gordon, I am writing to take issue with a letter that was sent to you on March 19th by Glen Campbell and Susan King on behalf of the Professional/Scholarly Publishing Division (PSP) of the Association of American Publishers (AAP). The Rockefeller University Press is a member of the AAP/PSP, but Mr. Campbell and Ms. King do not represent our views regarding public access to scholarly research. We strongly support the efforts of the Federal government, such as the NIH mandate and the Federal Research Public Access Act, to provide public access to the results of Federally funded research. In their letter, Mr. Campbell and Ms. King state that, "As of now, the impact of the Federal Government-mandated and unfunded embargo periods on the continued viability of affected publishers is not clear and could not be quantified by the Roundtable or other experts who have studied the issue." This is inaccurate. We and other non-commercial publishers of biomedical research journals have shown that public access to journal content six months after publication is compatible with continued subscription sales. At The Rockefeller University Press, we have provided this form of public access since January, 2001, and our subscription revenues have grown every year through 2009. Mr. Campbell and Ms. King also state that Federal public access initiatives are "not consistent with copyright principles." This is also inaccurate. The copyrights to which they refer are taken by most publishers from their rightful owners, the authors of scholarly articles. The Federal public access initiative is completely consistent with the authors’ desire to have their work disseminated as widely as possible. Even when they are required to sign over copyright to a publisher, authors who are subject to the NIH mandate legally retain the right to place their articles in a public repository (PubMed Central) for distribution to the public 12 months after the publication date. Thus, Federal public access initiatives are also consistent with copyright law. We at The Rockefeller University Press disagree with the tactics used by Mr. Campbell and Ms. King, who claim that Federal public access initiatives threaten their business model, but they do not provide any data to back up this claim. The data that we cite above indicate that public access mandates are not a threat to the subscription-based business models of scholarly publishers. Yours sincerely, Mike Rossner, Ph.D. Executive Director The Rockefeller University Press [email protected] These comments are the opinion of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of The Rockefeller University.
