Richard Poynder has posted his interview with Lawrence Lessig. This is the latest installment of The Basement Interviews, Poynder's blog-based OA book of interviews with leaders of many related openness initiatives. Excerpt:
RP: One constraint, clearly, is that as a condition of publishing they are usually required to assign copyright in their scientific papers to journal publishers. Can you expand on the moral obligation scientists have?
LL: For most of the history of scientific publication the very cost of publishing meant that it was impossible to make scientific work universally accessible, since publishers needed to control distribution in order to recover their costs. Now that we have the Internet, however, it is extremely inexpensive to spread scientific work broadly. So we think that there is moral obligation on scientists to recalibrate what they are doing, and instead of just producing knowledge, to produce universally accessible knowledge.
RP: That is precisely what the Open Access Movement advocates. Given what you say about a moral obligation I am surprised that it took you personally so long to commit to Open Access. Why was that? ...I am referring to the commitment you made in 2005 to henceforth only publish in law journals that would allow them to be made freely available on the Web, rather than locked behind the financial firewall of a journal subscription?
LL: What I did was to say that I am never going to publish again a legal review article in a journal that doesn’t permit Open Access. It's not that I didn’t support Open Access before, or that I was converted in my belief: it was just that I hadn’t decided that I was going to limit my publishing opportunities....
RP: So what are you encouraging: that professors publish only in so-called gold journals, where the publisher makes the papers freely available on the Web; or that they adopt the green strategy, and continue to publish in traditional subscription-based journals, but then self-archive their papers themselves in open access repositories?
LL: I'm not talking about self-archiving. In my view it isn’t enough. It is a practical step, but it is not a step that guarantees any freedoms. Self-archiving leads to a whole bunch of documents for which the copyright status is uncertain. It is that uncertainty that I am trying to eliminate. But neither do the journals have to be in the category of gold publishing: what they need to have done is to commit to the Open Access Law Principles. This means that they have committed to allowing authors the right to engage in — and to enable others to engage in — republishing their work, at least for non-commercial purposes.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 4/07/2006 11:21:00 AM.
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.
