Happy Anniversary DC Principles Coalition: A Decade of Striving for a Middle Ground

摘要

On March 16, 2004, APS and a group of scientific society publishers gathered at the National Press Club to launch the Washington DC Principles Coalition for Free Access to Science (DC Principles). The coalition's goal was to provide a needed middle ground amidst calls for immediate open access (OA) to the biomedical literature as a replacement for the existing system of subscription access, which OA advocates typically caricatured as a closed system controlled by greedy commercial publishers. As Karin Wittenborg, University Librarian, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, noted at the DC Principles launch, society publishers were the "good guys in white hats" because they provided access to high-quality scientific content at reasonable prices. The DC Principles publishers, many of whom published electronic versions of their journals through Stanford's HighWire Press, believed in public access and wanted to ensure the broadest and freest possible dissemination of scientific literature.