Sir – Concerns about 10,000 jobs in Oxford’s academic publishing industry, if publicly-funded research becomes freely available on the Internet (Report, August 2), are wider than job losses in Oxfordshire alone.
The impact is already being felt by the global academic and publishing communities. Long-established peer-review and quality assurance processes are under threat. Digital preservation, validation, equitable pricing and the quality of published research itself present critical ethical dilemmas which cannot be ignored by commercial or emergent digital publishers.
These risks and wider ethical concerns are the focus of an international workshop, part of a series, organised by GreyNet International and InfoEthics UK in Oxford on Thursday, September 6. We are all traditional and emerging publishers, librarians and knowledge brokers, users and researchers — information professionals in the process of knowledge transfer.
As Government policy on open access evolves, this surely is the right moment for us to come together to address these concerns. Overlooking the ethical dimensions in scholarly publishing is too risky and failing to address the challenges to all our roles is too important to ignore.
Sylvia Simmons, InfoEthics UK, London
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