...Today, with the advent of networked information systems facilitating global collaboration, a good deal of knowledge is being hammered out and openly shared online today. It is tempting, at this early stage, to imagine that the openness of this knowledge is contributing to the educational and democratic quality of our lives and, in this optimistic and perhaps naive vein, to look for ways of supporting its development....
[W]hat distinguishes today?s information flow in a more promising way is how people are coming online to discover, read, review, revise, instruct, and comment. It is like a massive second wave of the public library movement that swept large and small communities more than a century ago, only this time with annotation, commentary and marginal notes invited. Pundits may decry the ineptness to be found in much of it, but I come at this as an educator. Teachers work hard to foster just such engagement, interpretation, and judgment because it speaks to an educated sensibility and concern. It speaks to a democratic exuberance that will take some getting used to, much as did the idea of teaching every child to read and write, as a human right....
What, then, of the scholarly publishers? fears that this open access approach to scholarship threatens the viability of the peer-review journal? ...
In fact...it appears that there is more than enough money on the table to make all that is published freely and universally available. I say more than enough, because studies by Ted Bergstrom show that in economics the scholarly societies are publishing the highest quality journals for a fifth of the cost (on a per-page basis) of the corporate publishers who currently hold a majority of the titles in this field....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/15/2008 10:56:00 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.
