(1) Maria Francisca Ham describes the harm caused by the toll-access business model in Indonesia and China. "Only by contacting the authors and overseas friends could we finally read the articles and do the research. The same frustrating experience also happened to doctors in China. It is unquestionable that the user-pays system has harmed communication of research findings to the medical community in these countries, and its consequences for the improvement of medical services is obvious."
(2) Vivien Siegel of PLoS defends OA publishing against Brian Crawford's criticism in the 11/8/03 issue. "[T]he two largest private funders of biomedical research in the world now recognise the value of and need to support open access. Why? The internet makes it possible to share medical knowledge more widely than ever before. In an online world, it is also possible to attribute a fixed cost to the services that publishers provide --and to pay for virtually all of them before publication....Contrary to Crawford's claim, it simply is not true that 'the [corporate] publisher has no reason to limit the dissemination of information'. If it were, they would remove the password protections from their websites and make authors' works available to anyone who wanted to see them."
(3) Anthony Costello and David Osrin describe their responsibility to ensure wide dissemination of their research on children's health. "The issue of open-access or closed-access electronic publication presents us with a new ethical dilemma. Our priority for submission of articles is steadily shifting from a consideration of impact factor to the assurance of broad dissemination. Free and full-text internet access to research findings for scientists, policy makers, and health professionals is preferable, particularly in poor countries where access to most journals is denied. Faced with the option of submitting to an open-access or closed-access journal, we now wonder whether it is ethical for us to opt for closed access on the grounds of impact factor or preferred specialist audience."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 7/13/2004 10:49:00 AM.
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.
