Patrick Brown, Vantage Point: Free online scientific journals make sense, Stanford Report, February 26, 2004. One of the three founders of the Public Library of Science articulates and defends his vision. Excerpt: "The public library, one of the greatest inventions of human civilization, has been waiting for the Internet. What seemed an impossible ideal in 1836, when Antonio Panizzi, librarian of the British Museum, wrote, 'I want a poor student to have the same means of indulging his learned curiosity,...of consulting the same authorities,...as the richest man in the kingdoms,' is today within reach. With the Internet, we have the means to make humanity's treasury of knowledge freely available to scientists, teachers, students and the public around the world. But it won't happen automatically....Even at Stanford, the restrictions on access prevent us from being able to search the entire corpus of scientific articles for particular terms, concepts, methods, data or images and retrieve the results -- you can't "Google" the millions of scientific articles that have been published online!...Charging for access is...no longer economically necessary, rational or fair -- it needlessly limits access to an essential public good. What's the alternative? Just as midwives can earn a living without claiming ownership or control of the babies they deliver, publishers can and should be paid a fair price by the sponsors of the research -- a 'midwife's fee' -- for their role in orchestrating peer-review, editing and disseminating the results. But they should not be given the baby -- our baby -- to own and control. By paying publishers for each article at the time of its publication, instead of allowing them to own the article and charge for access, the doors to the online library could be opened to everyone."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 2/26/2004 03:48:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
