Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Thursday, May 11, 2006

Who asked publishers to protect lay readers from knowledge?

Dorothea Salo, Designated Gatekeepers? Caveat Lector, May 10, 2006. Excerpt:

The new blog Carrollogos...dissects the claim that open access is harmful because lay readers do not have the training or experience to interpret research articles. (See the New York Times for examples of this argument, lest anyone think homines straminei are what’s at stake here.)  Carroll’s counter-arguments are good, and so are the comments, but I have another angle on the issue. Simply put: when did gatekeeping become part of publisher mandate?

If you ask a researcher or a librarian what publishers are for, “keeping knowledge out of the hands of inexperienced readers” is not going to appear on the response list. I don’t know any publishers who attract submissions because they promise fewer readers!  Indeed, I suspect the majority researcher response to the inexperienced-reader question, if it were posed outright, would be a bewildered stare and “If they’re willing to wade through it, why would I stop them?” I grant that a substantial minority response would be the snobbish “They can’t possibly care or understand,” but even in that case, I doubt the researcher would want the publisher deciding who is or isn’t a qualified reader!

Do publishers really act as gatekeepers now? Do they vet all their subscription requests for competence in the related field of inquiry? (I can just see it: “No, this community-college library may not subscribe to the Journal of Incomprehensible Results! They’re not worthy!”) Do eighteen-year-old undergraduates, who have the full run of their libraries, really count as “qualified” readers? Does it bother publishers that lay readers can walk freely into a great many academic libraries (though, sadly, fewer than in days of yore) and read their journals? 

And what about reprint requests, or pay-per-downloads? What competency controls do publishers maintain on those? Yes, I’m laughing too. This is all about the money. We know that, publishers know that; let’s everybody cut out the nonsense....