This morning, the AAP was publicly obsessed with FreeCulture.org and that organization's "radical" agenda.
This afternoon, we learn that attendees of the AAP/PSP's annual conference listened to --and held a lively Q&A session with-- a FreeCulture.org member earlier in the week.
From a post today by Asheesh Laroia to the FreeCulture.org blog:
This past Monday, I had a chance a chance to give academic publishers a piece of my mind.
The Professional and Scholarly Publishing division of AAP held a pre-conference meeting that Monday to talk about the way technology, specifically "Web 2.0?, was affecting the way students consume and use academic content....It was a very active, interested group attending our panel, and I really appreciated that.
From Laroia's recollection of the Q&A session that followed:
Q. What you've described sounds great from a student perspective. But if you continue your academic career, won't you want to be published in the most well-known journals?
A. That's a great question. (laughter) Sure, I'll want to advance my CV and publish in where everyone important to me will read my work. In natural language processing in computer science, that probably means conference proceedings, most of which are available on the web for free anyway. Later on in my career, when I'm established, I'll have the ability to choose where I publish, and if open access to my work is important to me, I'll be able to make sure that happens. But as I pointed out with NLP work, access and prestige aren't necessarily at odds....
I enjoyed Laroia's post, and I'm glad that AAP/PSP members were apparently interested in what he had to say.
Comment. I commend the AAP/PSP for inviting students to give their perspectives and I commend Laroia for a straight answer to a curve-ball question. The questioner was assuming that all high-prestige journals are TA and always will be. Laroia saw through that, which even many publishing scholars fail to do. I'd only add that publishing in a high-prestige TA journal is almost always compatible with OA archiving. About 70% of TA journals give blanket permission for OA archiving, eliminating any need to worry about trade-offs.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 2/10/2007 02:33:00 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.
