Report and Recommendations From The Scholarly Publishing Roundtable

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Jan 13

In mid-2009, the House Committee on Science and Technology in conjunction with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) convened a body of stakeholders to discuss scholarly publishing. They were specifically asked to "develop a consensus regarding access to and preservation of the results of federally funded research that addresses the needs of all parties." Roundtable stakeholders from within the NFAIS membership included the American Institute of Physics (AIP) and Elsevier.

The Roundtable's core recommendation was that "Each federal research funding agency should expeditiously but carefully develop and implement an explicit public access policy that brings about free public access to the results of the research that it funds as soon as possible after those results have been published in a peer-reviewed journal."

The report with associated documents are accessible at the site of the Association of American Universities.

The efforts of the CrossRef organization (most specifically, their new Crossmark initiative), received particular notice for support of both interoperability as well as certification with regard to the version of record of published research.

Participants were asked to "either agree to or decline to sign the current draft of the report in its totality." Neither the representative from Elsevier nor the representative from the Public Library of Science felt able to sign; statements from each as to the rationale also appear on the AAU site (link above).