Roger Pollack, Mr Toad slightly endangered, Eclectica, January 10, 2005. Excerpt: 'Universities employ academic staff to carry out research. The academics write up their research in the form of articles which they hope will be published. If an academic has enough articles published they will be paid even more by their university. To get their articles published the academics must give their work (including the copyright) free of charge to commercial publishers. The publishers print and bind the articles neatly and then sell them back to university libraries. Yes, that's right, the universities are buying back the work of their own employees....[Publishers have] been doing very well out of academic stupidity. Perhaps the Internet and Open Access will start to give the taxpayers a better deal. It rather depends whether the Government can spare any time from its internal catfights to do some serious work to produce a more sensible system. I doubt if they will unless the Daily Mail starts writing some leaders on the subject.'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 2/06/2005 07:34:00 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.
