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The contribution of scholarly publishing to the advancement of science over more than 400 years has been made possible by the management and stewardship of the private sector. Each year, non-profit and commercial journals invest time, expertise and hundreds of millions of dollars to peer review, publish, preserve, archive and disseminate the knowledge that comes from scientific, technical and medical research. That vital private sector contribution is now under threat by ill-advised and misinformed policy proposals.
Recent initiatives have been floated that would expropriate from nonprofit and commercial journals results of their work in conducting peer review of authors submissions -- if the authors' research was funded by the government. The government would then post these articles for free use on the Internet and in direct competition with the journals from which the articles are taken. The expropriation of the journals' contribution is being proposed in spite of the fact it is the publisher and not the government who conducts the peer review.
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| Copyright Corbis |
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