Open Access News

... The traditional journal system is broken. Too many of the journals cost too much–and strip academic libraries of the flexibility to maintain solid monograph and humanities collections because they’re trying, impossibly, to keep up with those faster-than-inflation price rises. The net result is that fewer people have access to less of the research over time. That’s not good for the fields, it’s not good for people seeking out information. ...

... Open Access matters to me because I think it's important for the fruits of scholarship to be as widely accessible as possible. It is only through the widest availability that the state of the art will be examined, tested and pushed further. ...

I believe that publishers and librarians are essentially on the same side in all of this. We both want to get the highest quality materials to scholars. Librarians, publishers and scholars can and should work together to build sustainable business models for scholarly publishing that include the materials being free to all readers. ...

... HUP plans to wade into the pool ourselves with the launch this fall of the Journal of Legal Analysis, "a peer-reviewed open access journal sponsored by the Harvard Law School," which will publish, free of charge, superior scholarship in legal analysis from all disciplines. Articles will be faculty-edited and refereed by our fine friends at the Law School, so if you think you've got the goods check out the journal's website for a list of already-accepted articles and contact info for the editorial team. We'll be publishing using the Public Knowledge Project's Open Journal Systems, which will allow us to make the content freely available while preserving all the bits and pieces of the traditional publishing process, including indexing and all that thrilling stuff. ...

... Open access matters to me because I’m an idealist at heart. There, I said it. ... But my idealism in this regard runs a little deeper than simple bleeding-heart liberalism; as an academic, I’m not in this knowledge production business to hoard ideas and information and knowledge that could potentially make the world a better place. The whole point of scientific research is to address real-world problems. If I wanted to hide my light under a basket, I would have stayed in industry, where my hourly billing rate was pretty astronomical (a good web analytics professional doesn’t come cheap). I want to do science to make the world better, not just to improve the scholarship of privileged institutions. I’m motivated to make an intellectual contribution for its own sake, not to make a buck ...

Convincing scientists to embrace Open Access should fundamentally be an “easy sell”.  I can’t think of many faculty I know who would say that the current predominate “everybody pays” model is the best for them or for the communication of their research.  Because of this, I’m often left wondering why it seems that adoption of OA across the board hasn’t happened already.

There are many contributing factors of course.  It seems to me that the main issues are education and inertia.  The OA community has to inform those who are doing the research about the benefits over a subscription model (which is partly the reason for today’s Open Access Day, as well as a major initiative for many of the organizations involved in the movement).  To me the more difficult task, and in some ways one that must be accomplished sooner, is development of even more of a driving force towards OA.  ... In my mind, education about OA lowers the energy of activation, while development of these new ways to leverage OA content reduce the “energy of the products”.  Both of these are favorable for the “reaction” to take place. ...

... OA, for me, marks a turning point within the scientific cycle, i.e. the iterative process which leads (if sufficiently funded) from a research question or idea to a hypothesis or new method that can be tested and, ultimately, to the results of those tests which then have to be communicated. This communication step is crucial, as it adds to our global knowledge foundation (often described, following Newton, as "the shoulders of giants") for new research questions or ideas that may eventually lead to things like "innovation", "insight" and "progress". If innovators-to-be, however, do not have access to the findings of their forebears (which may indeed be contemporaries), they will have to spend a lot of their time and resources by (re)inventing some aspects of the giants' shoulders before starting to work on their innovations in the first place. ...

... [P]erhaps [OA] signals a fundamental change in the way that information is flowed from writers to readers and an admission that the traditional publishing process is obsolete in the digital age. We live in a world where people expect instant information in the top 20 hits from a Google and that expectation is transferring the science too. It doesn’t matter how prestigious your journal is. People want information, they want it now! And if you can’t deliver, they are going somewhere else. ...