ESA Position » Letters from the President:
June 30, 2006
The Honorable John Cornyn
United States Senate
The Honorable Joseph Lieberman
United States Senate
Dear Senators Cornyn and Lieberman:
On behalf of the Ecological Society of America (ESA), a scientific society of nearly 10,000 ecological scientists, I write to express my concern regarding S. 2695, the “Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006.”
While the Ecological Society of America (ESA) appreciates and understands the impetus behind promoting increased accessibility to peer-reviewed research, the bill as proposed, would create serious problems for non-profit publishers. As yet, there is no long-term, financially viable business model for full open access publishing (e.g. journals operating under the author-pays model, see www.alpsp.org/publications/pub11.htm).
Scientific societies provide important services essential to peer-reviewed publishing, including orchestration of the peer review system (vital for maintaining the quality of scientific publications), copyediting, formatting, printing for distribution, publishing online, and maintaining a permanent, searchable archive.
Unlike the field of medicine, where information becomes out of date very quickly, ecological and environmental information has a long “shelf-life”, so that a six-month delay before allowing open access to our publications will do very little to mitigate the negative impact on the Society’s journals. Journal revenues allow professional scientific societies such as the ESA to support various activities, including educational initiatives, scientific conferences, and provision of information to policy makers and the public.
ESA has a long history of sharing the ecological knowledge generated by its members through public support. Indeed, a key part of the Society’s mission is to foster the diffusion of scientific and technical knowledge and its use. In addition to making numerous publications available for free on its website for the past 10 years, the Society grants permission to all authors to post papers, which they have published in ESA’s peer-reviewed journals, on their institutional or personal website. The Society has also made available the entire contents of its journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment when the subject matter was deemed to be of interest to the public at large.
I hope that you will give serious consideration to our concerns and would be happy to discuss them further with you or your staff.
Sincerely,
Nancy B. Grimm
President
