... If Harvard is the entity actually providing the work most widely, circulating it and allowing people to read it, what exactly does the [American Anthropological Association] or [Wiley-Blackwell] provide for you?
This isn’t a stupid question, in fact it’s at the heart of both the old problem AAA had (how to pay for the costs of publication) as well as the new problem it has (how to pay for the costs of publication when authors and their universities are giving it away for free). The answer, to my mind is actually simple: what AAA can provide is, among other things:
prestige;
high quality peer review;
creative, path-breaking editorial vision;
promotion and marketing;
public policy relevance and creative use of new information technology and new networking and publicity possibilities. ...
However, how many of these things do AAA and WB adequately provide today? ...
So this puts us back in the same place as before: what exactly is the AAA providing that we can’t get elsewhere? ...
Posted by
Gavin Baker at 3/10/2008 04:22:00 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.
