Harold Varmus gave a talk explaining what Open Access is (and what it is not, but sometimes poses as OA), how it works, why it is good, and why it is inevitable. Did you know that the paper he won his Nobel for is not available online (OK, it is now, because a professor in Iowa copied it and pasted it on his course homepage)? He diagnosed the problems in the structure of academia as well as in the publishing industry that stand as obstacles to the move towards Open Access and suggested some possible ways to remove such obstacles. He understands that OA will have an effect on the way science is done and scientific departments and institutes are organized and run....
Stuart Shieber did us all a service by starting the discussion with a clear differentiation between two questions. The first question is static: is OA good and inevitable? The answer is an obvious and emphatic Yes, and there is not much more to debate there. The second question is dynamic: how do we get from here to there without cataclysmic effects on scientific publishing? In other words, how do we avoid the potential negative consequences, and what aspects of the current system are worth preserving and which ones are not....
Thus, it is not surprising that most of the discussion on the First Panel centered on the business aspects of science publishing. Will the move to OA upset the current hierarchies and is that good or bad? Will it result in some organizations being forced to close shop entirely? How would it affect the publishing in humanities? What is the role of academic libraries?
This debate is obviously not all Black And White. Many of the concerns by the publishers, represented here by Emilie Marcus, are legitimate. She is the editor of Cell and obviously a very good one. She wants to preserve the high stature of Cell as a journal. Certainly nobody wants to see Cell fail. But her efforts directly feed into what Harold calls "CNS disease" - the common practice in some areas of biomedical science at some universities to decide jobs, promotions and tenure according to the number of publications in Cell, Nature and Science. This practice boosts the reputation of Cell, Nature and Science (at the expense of other good journals). Their Impact Factor goes up, leaving the competition in the dust, thus further feeding the CNS disease....
Why does the CNS disease produce super-competitiveness, secretiveness, jealousy, fear-of-scooping, motivation to cheat and other by-products that are obviously bad for the practice of science? Science is supposed to be a collaborative and joyful enterprise....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/22/2007 01:04:00 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.
