Another group of academic publishers has taken a stand in the open-access wars. The Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers announced this week its endorsement of the Brussels Declaration on STM Publishing. That document spells out “key industry principles” articulated by the International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers in response to a European Commission conference on scientific publishing this year.

The American publishers’ scholarly division includes more than 100 members who “publish the vast majority of materials used in the U.S. by scholars and professsionals” in the sciences, medicine, business, law, the social sciences, and the humanities. “We applaud STM for creating a declaration that frames the key issues in the current debate about how best to advance scholarly communication in the digital age,” said Barbara Meredith, vice president for professional and scholarly publishing.

The publishers’ group notes that while the declaration “takes no position for or against any particular business model, it does caution that the open deposit of accepted author manuscripts risks destabilizing subscription revenues and undermining the integrity of the peer-reviewed literature.” To date, 43 commercial and nonprofit society publishers and 11 publishing associations have signed it.

The move follows hard on the heels of other significant open-access developments. Last month the Association of American University Presses issued a statement on open access that outlines what it sees as the risks and benefits of the principle. And this week the Howard Hughes Medical Institute announced a deal with the publishing giant Elsevier that would make much of the research the institute finances freely available six months after publication.