Oh dear, this is depressing to watch. The Problem Last year (2011-12-01), Peter Murray Rust of Cambridge University published an article in BMC’s Journal of Cheminformatics — which, like all BMC journals, is owned by Springer.

I just sent this letter to Matthew Cockerill, the co-founder of the open-access publisher BioMed Central, which was acquired by Springer a few years ago. It arose from a mistake on Springer’s part that was discussed on Twitter initially. As I wrote this I didn’t particularly intend it to be an open letter.

An article in Times Higher Education tells of a new report, The Potential Effect of Making Journals Free After a Six Month Embargo , prepared by Linda Bennett of Gold Leaf for the Association of Learned, Professional and Society Publishers [ALPSP] and our old friends The Publishers Association. And this report contains very good news.

1. Publishing economics 101 Although publishing journal articles is now much less costly than it used to be (thanks to machine-readable submissions, paperless electronic distribution, etc.) it still costs some money to get a research paper from manuscript to its published form. So publishers — unless supported by grants, by government agencies or similar — need a revenue stream.

Today’s Guardian has a piece by Graham Taylor, director of academic, educational and professional publishing at the Publishers Association, entitled Attacking publishers will not make open access any more sustainable . It’s such a crock that I felt compelled to respond point-by-point in the comments.

My mind was blown yesterday by a tweet from Stuart Shieber: @bmcmatt: … and $585 to email a copy to a colleague. Someone (@maryannliebert) didn't get the memo on what "#openaccess" means.

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Good news! If you want to read research that was funded by the U.S. National Instututes of Health (NIH), you can. Their public access policy means that papers published on their dime become universally accessible in PubMed Central.

[The title of this post is an allusion to Matt’s older post Authors versus publishers.] Following on from yesterday’s rant, I’m moved to write this one by Stephen Curry’s report on the latest Finch Committee meeting.

I just read this in a Times Higher Eduction report on David Willetts’s recent speech: Oh, so publishers “will not accept” Green OA? Where the hell do they get the arrogance to assume that a funding body needs their permission to say how their money is going to be spent?