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Macmillan CEO comments on the hybrid model Richard Charkin, Of this and that, Charkin blog, September 4, 2006. Charkin is the CEO of Macmillan, the parent company of Nature. Excerpt:
Comment. Charkin implies that when asking about the value of OA, the question is whether OA improves the quality of the literature. It isn't. The question is whether it improves access to the literature, hence the usefulness of the literature, hence the productivity of researchers and the pace of research. Using a legible font doesn't improve the quality of the literature, but it's an obvious way to make literature more useful regardless of its quality. That's what OA does. There are subtle ways in which OA can improve the quality of literature, e.g. by removing incentives to compromise on peer review. But we don't have to reach those in order to understand how OA makes every kind of literature more useful. When Nature authors self-archive their articles (which Nature permits), the articles are more useful than they were before, even though they have not changed in quality. |