Thomas Liesegang, Andrew Schachat and Daniel Albert, The Open Access initiative in scientific and biomedical publishing: Fourth in the series on editorship, American Journal of Ophthalmology, January 2005. An editorial. Excerpt: 'The premise of the Open Access initiative is that society benefits from the open exchange of ideas and that access to copyrighted or non-copyrighted materials inspires creativity and facilitates the development of new knowledge. Open access does not apply to materials for which the authors expect to generate revenue, for example, most textbooks. A conflict has developed between the traditional print journal and the Open Access advocates since the model affects publishing businesses, journals, academic institutions, government, researchers, and the reading public. The mutual success of traditional print and Open Access may not be possible because of the costs of both systems....All publishers must continue to innovate, observe the impact of Open Access, and assess how effectively such initiatives serve the needs of scientific and research communities. As developments bring demonstrable and sustainable improvements for those communities, publishers must adapt and invest accordingly.'
(PS: This is the longest and most detailed of the journal editorials about OA I've seen recently. Although it uncritically repeats some canards --e.g. that OA journals compromise on peer review [reply], that the current system works well [reply], and that OA is incompatible with print [reply]-- it tries harder to be judicious than most other journal editorials skeptical about OA.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/18/2005 10:40:00 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.
