Jason Bobe, Richter Scale and Your Genomic Portfolio, The Personal Genome, July 31, 2007. (Thanks to My Biotech Life.) Jason outlines a way to help people understand their genetic risks for various diseases and get beyond the superficiality and sensationalism of popular media (“scientists discover a gene for Alzheimer’s”). In the middle of the discussion he pauses for an aside:
Promote open access to scientific and medical literature
This is a plea to scientists and researchers to be more thoughtful about how and where they publish their scientific work. There are lots of interesting possibilities when people can actually access your published work. In return for sharing your data, there may be legions of people that can help ensure that your discoveries and insights can achieve maximum impact.
Since I brought it up, ethicists, legal scholars, policy-makers, public health people and many other stripes of experts should be more conscientious about where they publish their intellectual output. I’m not going to pay $25 per article so that I can get an education about issues that directly affect me. It is easy to attack journalists and bloggers for getting their facts wrong, but we’re living in an information wasteland without access to good scholarly work. Trash in, trash out. This has to change. [Warning: Melodramatic comment dead ahead] We need nothing less than a publishing perestroika.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 8/01/2007 10:47:00 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.
