Home » post » Association of American Publishers says taxpayers have not paid for journal articles

Our mission

Free Government Information (FGI) is a place for initiating dialogue and building consensus among the various players (libraries, government agencies, non-profit organizations, researchers, journalists, etc.) who have a stake in the preservation of and perpetual free access to government information. FGI promotes free government information through collaboration, education, advocacy and research.

Association of American Publishers says taxpayers have not paid for journal articles

More reporting on the hearing this week on Public Access to Federally-Funded Research:

In his testimony to the House Committee On Oversight and Government Reform, Alan Adler of the Association of American Publishers, said:

Publishers strongly believe that American taxpayers are entitled to the research they’ve paid for…. But taxpayers have not paid for the private sector, peer-reviewed journal articles reporting on that research.

…Peer-reviewed articles published in scholarly journals are not research, federally-funded or otherwise. They describe and explain the process, findings and significance of research. They require substantial amounts of the publisher’s resources to ensure that their content is accurate, new, and important.

Or, as Barbara Fister comments at Inside Higher Education,

Sure, taxpayers are entitled to federally funded research, but “peer-reviewed articles published in scholarly articles are not research.” No, they are the intellectual property of publishers, because they’re the ones who spend all kinds of money to make sure the science in them is accurate.

I’m not kidding. He actually said that. It’s publishers who make sure the research is “accurate, new, and important.” That peer review you do for free? They have to spend millions to make sure you do it right.

So we have no problem, and taxpayers have to right to this stuff because it’s not research.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.


Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Archives