Access to the literature, Nature and PRISM
From Nature 449, 13 (2007):
The Association of American Publishers* is taking part in an initiative to protest against what it calls government interference in the scholarly communication process.
Some groups and legislators are pushing for all publicly financed research to be made freely available to the public. Many traditional publishers object, and some have used aggressive tactics to fight the movement (see Nature 445, 347; 2007).
The initiative — called the Partnership for Research Integrity in Science and Medicine — says that it wants to provide the public with more information about scholarly publishing. One of its principles is that "society is best served by sustainable business models and reasonable copyright protections". News of the group's formation did not go down well in the blogosphere, where a number of critics attacked it for implying that open-access publication harms peer review. (*Nature's US division, Nature America, is a member of the Association of American Publishers.)
Timo Hannay, Nature Publishing Group's web publishing director, writes on Nascent blog: "Although 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 (from submitting manuscripts to PubMed Central on behalf of our authors to establishing Nature Precedings), and our policies are already compliant with the proposed NIH mandate." The Nature journals' policies on archiving and preprint servers can be found at our author and reviewers' website.
Timo's further thoughts and opinions about PRISM, "open-access" publishing and the manners of some individuals involved, are provided in his excellent Nascent post, which I recommend you read if you have any interest in this topic. There is a comment thread at the Nascent posting, to which you are welcome to add, or you may comment here.