A news in brief article reported that the Association of American Publishers (AAP) is taking part in the Partnership for Research Integrity in Science and Medicine (PRISM). The PRISM initiative protests against government interference in scholarly communication. Some groups and legislators are pushing for all publicly financed research to be made freely available, whereas PRISM holds that “society is best served by sustainable business models and reasonable copyright protections”.
Timo Hannay, web publishing director at Nature Publishing Group (NPG), writes on Nascent: Nature America is a member of the AAP, we are not involved in PRISM and we have not been consulted about it. NPG has supported self-archiving in various ways and our policies are already compliant with the proposed US National Institutes of Health mandate.”
Nature’s policies can be found at our author website. Hannay’s Nascent post, with further thoughts and opinions about ‘open-access’ publishing, is highly recommended reading. See also this Nautilus post.
Nature 449, xiii; 27 September 2007