Not Spaghetti

The last few days have seen a bit of open warfare on the "open access" frontlines, surrounding a bill currently being reviewed in the house, H.R. 801, the "Fair Copyright in Research Works Act", which rescinds the NIH's open-access mandate. That mandate requires authors of papers on research funded by the NIH to make a copy of their article publicly available 12 months after publication, and has been in place for a few years now. I haven't heard that the mandate has done any significant harm to science publishers, or made much difference to accessibility of scientific research articles, but I haven't really been following closely and the bio-medical literature is not my speciality, certainly.

Kevin Kelly is one of the writers I love to read as he has an interesting vision of the dematerializing future. It's already happened where I work - before I started here, our revenue came essentially entirely from libraries subscribing to receive print copies of our journals. Now we sell access to the journals online, and take responsibility for hosting - as does every other scientific publisher still in business. Almost nobody wants the print journals any more.