editor’s letter

DOI: 10.1145/2160718.2160719
Moshe Y. Vardi
fair Access
There has been sound and fury in the Open Access
movement over the last few months. On December 16,
2011, The Research Works Act (RWA) was introduced in
the U.S. House of Representatives. The bill contained

provisions to prohibit open-access mandates for federally funded research, effectively nullifying the National Institutes of Health’s policy that requires taxpayer-funded research to be freely accessible online. Many scholarly publishers, including the Association of American Publishers (AAP), expressed support for the bill.

The reaction to the bill and its support by scholarly publishers has been one of sheer outrage, with headlines such as “Academic Publishers Have Become the Enemies of Science.” On January 21, 2012, renowned British mathematician Timothy Gowers declared a boycott on Elsevier, a major scholarly publisher, in a detailed blog posting.

The boycott movement then took off,
with over 8,000 scientists having joined
it so far. By the end of February, Else-
vier had withdrawn its support of RWA,
and its sponsors in U.S. House of Rep-
resentatives announced that RWA “has
exhausted the useful role it can play in
the debate.”
Now that things have quieted down
a bit, we can revisit the arguments for
open access, which I discussed first in
July 2009, in “Open, Closed, or Clopen
Access?” The basic question I would
like to address again is what ACM’s
stance should be with respect to open-
access publishing models. (As pointed
out in the July 2009 letter, ACM is a
Green-Open-Access publisher.)

The arguments in favor of open ac-
cess have evolved somewhat since the
movement emerged about a decade
ago. Early arguments talked about
broad dissemination of information,
under the slogan “information wants
to be free.” Recent arguments have
focused on fairness, as expressed in
the headline “Congress Considers Pay-
walling Science You Already Paid For.”
But one should not conflate the cost of
carrying out research with the cost of
publishing the results. Furthermore,
universities and academic researchers
profit from intellectual property devel-
oped under federal funding, and I see
no outrage about that.