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"The fate of scholarly societies is one of the most contentious and even emotional in the open access landscape. Many researchers have strong emotional ties to their disciplinary societies and these societies often play a crucial role in supporting meetings, providing travel stipends to young researchers, awarding prizes, and representing the community. At the same time they face a peculiar bind. The money that supports these efforts often comes from journal subscriptions. "

Today, 81 U.S. scholarly journal publishing organizations expressed their strong opposition to the third introduction of the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA, H.R. 4004 and S.2096).

Scientific information is both a researcher's greatest output and technological innovation's most important resource. Open Access (OA) is the provision of free access to peer-reviewed, scholarly and research information to all. It requires that the rights holder grants worldwide irrevocable right of access to copy, use, distribute, transmit, and make derivative works in any format for any lawful activities with proper attribution to the original author. Open Access uses Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to increase and enhance the dissemination of scholarship. OA is about Freedom, Flexibility and Fairness.

"That's what you have to reckon with. Helped along by technology, that open culture has grown much stronger in the 10 years since another scholarly boycott aimed at publishers helped create the open-access Public Library of Science. Its flagship journal, PLoS One, published almost 14,000 articles last year, according to its publisher, Peter Binfield. "

"Digital Scholarship provides information and commentary about digital copyright, digital curation, digital repository, open access, scholarly communication, and other digital information issues."

"The open comment period ended last month. Much of the feedback came from two camps: libraries and universities, on the one hand; and scholarly associations and the companies that publish their peer-reviewed journals, on the other. A casual survey of the letters suggests that the feedback largely breaks along familiar lines - librarians arguing for quicker and easier access to research, and publishers offering suggestions for better access while discouraging measures that might threaten their subscription revenues."

""There were a number of simply wrong statements, and I would have liked the ability to clarify this in private first," Eysenbach says. One hazard of having such debates first in the public eye is that "if there is some critique of something, and you don't respond immediately even if you respond one or two days later, it's as good as no response [at all]," he says, "because by that time the damage to your reputation may already be done.""

Speaking of the future of scholarly publishing, and the role of publishers, Velterop says, "The evolution of scientific communication will go on, without any doubt, and although that may not mean the total demise of the traditional models, these models will necessarily change. After all, some dinosaur lineages survived as well. We call them birds. And there are some very attractive ones. They are smaller than the dinosaurs they evolved from, though. Much smaller."

Peter Suber Open Access