[GOAL] Re: [SCHOLCOMM] The OA Interviews: Ian Gibson, former Chairman of the UK House of Commons Science & Technology Committee

[Frederick Friend]

Congratulations to Richard Poynder on a brilliant and extremely valuable 
interview with Ian Gibson. As one who gave oral Evidence to the Science and 
Technology Committee in 2004, I can vouch for the accuracy of the comments 
on the Committee's work. Reading the Poynder interview made me fetch my 
copies of the Committee Report and Evidence, and I was immediately reminded 
of the thorough, evidence-based investigation by the Committee. The 2004 
documents ran to 114 pages for the Report and 479 pages of oral and written 
Evidence. Compare that with the measly 140 pages in the Finch Report, with 
very little evidence cited, and you can understand that the Finch Group 
missed or ignored much valuable evidence on the value of OA repositories and 
came to some poor recommendations in that area. One telling aspect of the 
Poynder interview was the way Ian Gibson changed his view of the Finch 
Report once Richard Poynder told him of the evidence of the large volume of 
OA content in repositories, evidence which does not appear in the Finch 
Report.

Re-reading the JISC written Memorandum to the Committee (in which I had a 
big hand), much of what we wrote would be true today and our recommendations 
to the Committee still valid. The biggest change since 2004 is that the UK 
Government of 2012 has accepted the case for open access which the 
Government of 2004 rejected. The problem is that their decision to support 
only journal publication for open access to current research reports leaves 
unresolved the basic flaws in the scholarly communication system that were 
recognised in 2004, flaws such as the effect upon prices of a lack of 
competition in access to a particular publication and of the lack of a 
direct financial link between the author as purchaser and the publisher as 
supplier of a service to the author. Ian Gibson makes very clear the efforts 
of publishers in 2004 to stay "at the centre of a system that was making 
them a lot of money", and publishers' influence upon current Government 
policy is directed towards the same end. This would not matter if the losers 
were not the research community in the effect upon the research budget and 
the UK taxpayer at a time of financial hardship.

Richard Poynder's commentary on the after-effects of the 2004 Report is 
accurate in pointing to the change in publisher policy from outright 
opposition to open access to support for gold open access as the means of 
ensuring their dominant role in scholarly communication. The only point I 
would add to that analysis is that publishers were un-intentionally 
encouraged in that process by the Wellcome Trust decision to pay publishers 
for immediate deposit of published articles in UKPMC. This action (not 
intended to justify gold OA but to raise the deposit rate in a repository) 
by a strong supporter of OA able to afford author publication charges fed 
through into the Finch Report and UK Government policy, and risks creating 
difficulties for other funders and institutions not as wealthy as the 
biomedical community.

Whatever the future holds I look back on the work of Ian Gibson and his 
colleagues on the Science and Technology Committee as evidence of the value 
to democracy of the UK parliamentary system and in particular the value of 
the Committees of Parliament in inquiring into truth. We had another example 
of this value last year in the questioning of certain newspaper executives. 
Long may the work of independent-minded politicians like Ian Gibson 
continue!

Fred Friend
Honorary Director Scholarly Communication UCL
http://www.friendofopenaccess.org.uk







-----Original Message----- 
From: Richard Poynder
Sent: Monday, October 29, 2012 10:42 AM
To: scholcomm at ala.org
Subject: [SCHOLCOMM] The OA Interviews: Ian Gibson, former Chairman of the 
UK House of Commons Science & Technology Committee

Like all successful movements, Open Access (OA) has experienced a number of
milestone events. Amongst the more significant of these were the creation of
the physics preprint repository arXiv in 1991, the 1994 Subversive Proposal,
the 2002 Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), and the introduction in 
2005
of the first  Open Access Policy of the US National Institutes of Health 
(NIH).

However, one of the more interesting but less celebrated events in the 
history
of OA is surely the 2004 Inquiry into scientific publication conducted by 
the
UK House of Commons Science & Technology Committee. The inquiry seems
particularly noteworthy in the wake of this year’s controversial Finch
Report, and the new OA policy that Research Councils UK (RCUK) announced in
response ...

... Given the very different conclusions that the Finch Committee had 
reached
earlier this year, I became keen to find out more about the origins and the
process of the 2004 Inquiry. So I contacted Dr Ian Gibson, the then Chairman 
of
the Science & Technology Select Committee, and Labour MP for Norwich North. 
To
my delight, he agreed to do an interview with me ...

More here:

http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/the-oa-interviews-ian-gibson-former.html