Michael Lightner, Message from the IEEE President, IEEE communications magazine, April 2006. (Thanks to Ahmed Hindawi.) Excerpt:
Finally, there is the growing issue of open access. A better way to frame this, in my opinion, is an interest in different business models for publications. What most people consider open access is an author pay model in which the cost of publication is absorbed by the author and the publishing organization, and the papers are free to the reader. IEEE does not have this model, although there are some experiments underway. In my opinion our challenge is to develop greater value for our aggregated IP. As a researcher I am interested in exploring questions/issues. Tools that aid that exploration, such as cognitive search tools, or the ability to return specific data from a search and not just papers are what we need to develop. These will add value to our collected IP far beyond the value of single papers. This is one way in which we can address the public interest of open access with the need to derive revenue from our IP products. My bottom line is that cost should never be a barrier to publishing in the IEEE.
Comment. I'm glad to hear about the OA experiments at IEEE and look forward to more detail. I just want to point out that providing sophisticated new search tools while charging for access to the content does not "address the public interest of open access". It simply decides against open access. Moreover, while it's certainly important that "cost should never be a barrier to publishing in the IEEE", this position is one-sided. Most researchers would argue that it's roughly as important that cost should never be a barrier to reading the research published by the IEEE. The real questions are two: (1) if we must choose, which value do we rank higher, and (2) do we have to choose? More than a thousand peer-reviewed journals offer no-fee access to readers and no-fee access to authors.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/10/2006 02:46:00 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.
