At the beginning of the month the World Health Organisation (WHO), Intergovernmental Working Group on Public Health, Innovation and Intellectual Property (IGWG2) convened to discuss the issues of Open Access (OA) and reach a global consensus for developing a strategy. What emerged was a weakening on the language requiring scientific publishers to comply with an OA model.

Manon Anne Ress on the Knowledge Ecology International blog details how the draft document on global strategy, penned at the end of summer, originally stated to “promote public access to the results of government funded research, through requirements that all investigators funded by governments submit to an open access database an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts”

By the time the IGWG2 met again in November the word “requirements” had been replaced in the document with “strongly encouraging”.

OA champions and commentators questioned how this would affect OA and would “encouragement” even if it was “strong” actually achieve anything from publishers? Significantly, they were questioning why the change had happened and particular who had made the call.

Peter Suber, over at Open Access News asked his readers “which national delegations inserted the strong language in the first draft and which wanted to weaken it in the new draft?”

I haven’t seen any follow-ups that specifically name names there, but as Ress reports in her post; “there was some opposition to the “requirement” language by some European countries”. It’s not unfair to say with the exception of CAS and Wiley the scientific publishing world is heavily dominated by European firms.

Most of these companies are attending our sister show Online Information next week and I’ll be sure to ask that question when I catch up with them then. I hope someone is happy to elaborate on this. After all, is there a reason to be anything but open about this?