Stop decrying the signal-to-noise ratio in online scholarly resources...and give open-source web journals your full support....
This selling of scholarship is creating a two-tier system between the information-rich and the information-poor in the higher education sector. Some institutions can afford to buy the range of journals from the commercial aggregators, while others are left with a reduced list. When moving into Google Scholar, researchers can see their university’s position in the digital pecking order....
While the Google Generation report notes that scholars are reading abstracts, it leaves unmentioned the fact that frequently only the title, author and abstract are available online without the use of a credit card....
The way to counter the commercial aggregators, improve the quality of online research and draw students away from blogs and Wikipedia is to commit to reading, citing,...and publishing in online, open access, refereed journals....
Researchers, writers, activists and citizens can complain about this corporate restriction of scholarship, or we can actually do something....
Comment. OA journals are part of the solution, for the reasons Brabazon outlines. But Brabazon doesn't mention OA archiving, which is another, complementary part of the solution.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 8/24/2008 10:51:00 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.
