Category Archives: oa.letters

Public access to published science is under threat in the US | InPublishing

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Eight science publishers have signed a letter to the House Appropriations subcommittee to raise the dangers of the Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies Appropriations Bill’s draft language.

Frontiers says The US House Appropriations Committee has released its 2024 Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies Appropriations Bill. It proposes new spending of $58 billion and seeks to “rein in the Washington bureaucracy by right-sizing agencies and programs.”

A group of eight science publishers have signed a letter to the House Appropriations subcommittee to raise the dangers of the bill’s draft language. If enacted, it would block federally funded research from being freely available to American taxpayers without delay on publication.

Individual Americans would be prevented from seeing the full benefits of the more than $90 billion in scientific research they fund each year via taxes. Science for the few who can access it – as opposed to the many who pay for it – is inefficient as scientific or democratic governmental policy.

 

 

Neil Gaiman, Alok Menon, Naomi Klein, Saul Williams, and 300+ authors pen open letter supporting libraries’ rights in the digital age | Fight for the Future

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Over 300 authors including Neil Gaiman, Alok Menon, Naomi Klein, Saul Williams, Hanif Abdurraqib, Lawrence Lessig, Chuck Wendig, and Cory Doctorow have released an open letter in support of the continued role of libraries in the digital age. 

It reads in part:

“Libraries are a fundamental collective good. We, the undersigned authors, are disheartened by the recent attacks against libraries being made in our name by trade associations such as the American Association of Publishers and the Publishers Association: undermining the traditional rights of libraries to own and preserve books, intimidating libraries with lawsuits, and smearing librarians.“

The full text of the letter, full list of signatories, as well as a form for more authors to sign on is available at http://FightForTheFuture.org/Authors-For-Libraries.

The letter demands that publishers, distributors, and trade associations:

Enshrine the right of libraries to own, preserve, and loan books on reasonable terms regardless of format
End lawsuits aimed to intimidate libraries or diminish their role in society
Halt industry-led smear campaigns against librarians

Notable among the signatories are Chuck Wendig and Neil Gaiman. Wendig initially criticized the Internet Archive’s temporary suspension of 1-owned-to-1-loaned restrictions during the first pandemic lockdown, but has since spoken out against major publishers’ lawsuit against the library, joining Gaiman. The suit seeks to end the Internet Archive’s Open Library Project, which partners with 80+ libraries including Boston Public Library, Milton Public Library, University of Arizona, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art to loan out digital scans of physical books the Internet Archive Library owns.

The suit’s scope reaches to the core of the right to own digital books. Briefs in the case are due October 7th. If publishers prevail, they will effectively terminate the rights of all libraries across the US to own, preserve, and loan digital books by “blocking” a practice called controlled digital lending—locking in licensing models with grave implications for readers’ safety.

 

A New Option for Scientific Exchange and an Alternative to the Commentary Format – Patricia J. Bauer, 2021

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“Letters to the Editors will be disseminated online only to permit more rapid publication and to keep the discussion timely and responsive. They will be hosted on Figshare, which is an online open-access repository and the site that hosts all of the journal’s Supplemental Material. To further speed dissemination, accepted Letters to the Editors will not be copyedited or held for replies but instead will be disseminated as quickly as possible on acceptance. Letters to the Editors will have DOIs but, fitting their existence in the liminal space between a formal publication and an unmediated social media conversation, they will not be indexed (i.e., discoverable through PubMed, PsycInfo, etc.). To facilitate connections between the target article and Letters to the Editors, they will be linked to each other. …”