John Blossom, Opportunity Knocks: Is the Open Access Movement Meeting its Full Potential?Commentary (the Shore Communications blog), January 17, 2005. Excerpt: 'As the enthusiasm for open access publishing in academic and scientific circles is starting to reach a fever pitch, publishers such as the Public Library of Science (PLoS) are adding new journals and getting more support to subsidize authors' contributions. This heady atmosphere is not without clouds on the horizon, though. The headlong rush to embrace open access publishing as a business model has created an anti-profit zeal that may limit its commercial success - a limitation that will give commercial publishers plenty of time to think about how they want to adopt their own business models to this new environment. Nobody has the corner on the market for publishing wisdom these days. Thank goodness....The good news for schools and professionals is that the broadening supply of free-to-users content makes for wide access to leading-edge ideas, increasing knowledge and accelerating discoveries. As noted in Janice McCallum's earlier news analysis on open access, exposing journals content to a wider array of search technologies allows it to flow into many more useful contexts, creating many new opportunities for creating content value. More problematic, though, are the business models that are - and aren't - being developed to underpin the open access movement....Established publishers aren't going away and are still well-funded....Commercial journals can go open, too.'
(PS: OA opposes price barriers to access, not profit. BioMed Central, for example, is a for-profit OA publisher. OA opposes priced journal literature, not the publishers that provide priced journal literature. If they adopt OA models, they will be welcomed as allies. OA does not require publisher setbacks.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/18/2005 10:04:00 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.
