There are some things which are so self-evidently right and good that it's hard to imagine how anyone could disagree with you. The "open access" academic journal movement is one of those things. It is a no-brainer. Academic literature should be freely available: developing countries need access; part-time tinkering thinkers like you deserve full access; journalists and the public can benefit; and most importantly of all, you have already paid for much of this stuff with your taxes. They are important new ideas from humanity, and morally, you are entitled to them.
But with old school academic journals, unless you have an institutional subscription, you have to pay to read them. Here is a not-so-fun example: an article called Impediments to promoting access to global knowledge in sub-Saharan Africa, about how difficult it is to get access to medical literature in developing countries, and how lack of access to knowledge represents a barrier to economic development and a further advantage for the rich west. Get your credit card ready, this single study will cost you $25 (£13) plus tax to read.
Two online, open access publishing organisations have led the fight against the absurdity: ...PLoS...[and] BioMed Central....
But meanwhile, the old school, pay-for-access journals are so worried about open access that they've hired Eric Dezenhall, the famous American "pitbull of PR", and author of Nail 'Em! Confronting High-Profile Attacks on Celebrities and Businesses, to aggressively promote their interests, and undermine open access....
For reader comments on this article, see the author's blog entry on it.
Comment. So far, so good. But remember that OA is also possible through OA repositories, not only through OA journals. Authors who want OA can submit their work to OA journals or deposit their peer-reviewed manuscripts in OA repositories (called self-archiving or OA archiving). To increase the amount of OA for readers and users, support the national OA policies, like FRPAA, which uniformly depend upon OA archiving rather than OA journals. To see such a policy adopted across Europe, sign the petition to the EC to mandate OA to publicly-funded research.
Update. See the STM response to Goldacre's article, February 13, 2007.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 2/10/2007 10:07:00 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.
