Open Letter to Research Councils UK: Rebuttal of ALPSP Critique

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Description/Abstract

The Research Councils of the UK (RCUK) propose to require that the authors of all journal articles resulting from RCUK-funded research must make them openly accessible by self-archiving them on the web in order maximise their usage and impact. ALPSP (Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers) claim that this will have a negative effect on journals, but the only evidence they provide fails to support their claim and all existing evidence is to the contrary: Journal publication coexists peacefully with author self-archiving, even when it reaches 100%, with both researchers and their journals benefitting from the resulting enhanced research usage and impact. The research journal publishing community should collaborate in sharing the benefits of self-archiving with the research community, rather than trying to delay and block them.