In the evidence presented to the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee Inquiry into Scientific Publications, many dubious arguments have been used by traditional publishers to attack the new Open Access publishing model.
| Myth 1 |
The cost of providing Open Access will reduce the availability of funding for research |
| Myth 2 |
Access is not a problem - virtually all UK researchers have the access they need |
| Myth 3 |
The public can get any article they want from the public library via interlibrary loan |
| Myth 4 |
Patients would be confused if they were to have free access to the peer-reviewed medical literature on the web |
| Myth 5 |
It is not fair that industry will benefit from Open Access |
| Myth 6 |
Open Access threatens scientific integrity due to a conflict of interest resulting from charging authors |
| Myth 7 |
Poor countries already have free access to the biomedical literature |
| Myth 8 |
Traditionally published content is more accessible than Open Access content as it is available in printed form |
| Myth 9 |
A high quality journal such as Nature would need to charge authors £10,000-£30,000 in order to move to an Open Access model |
| Myth 10 |
Publishers need to make huge profits in order to fund innovation |
| Myth 11 |
Publishers need to take copyright to protect the integrity of scientific articles |
