Marydee Ojala, Open Access: Open Sesame or Opening Pandora's Box? EContent, June 14, 2005. Excerpt: 'Primarily, OA focuses on peer-reviewed, scholarly literature. Philosophically, the open access concept is relatively straightforward. It's all about scholarly literature being freely available to other scholars in order to facilitate scholarly communication and enhance scholarly research. The preponderance of "scholarlies" in that sentence was intentional. Think of open access as an alternative publishing mechanism for scholarly literature. It attempts to circumvent the high subscription prices traditionally associated with this publishing niche, particularly for scientific and technical journals. It also seeks to accommodate the natural desire of academicians to share their research with others and to build upon what their colleagues are discovering. In that sense, it's like an "Open Sesame" to scholarly literature for both the academic research community and ordinary people.'
(PS: This is a primer that tries to correct misunderstandings. However, it has an irritating number of misunderstandings of its own. OAIster, not OAI, is based at the University of Michigan. I write SOAN and do not merely edit it. OA is not a kind of business model; it's a kind of access compatible with many different business models. Gold or full-OA journals do not all charge processing fees; fewer than half of them do. Authors don't need the permission of publishers to link to articles. The limitations on search engines are not lmitations on OA. Ojala does not explain the analogy to opening Pandora's box and even distances herself from it by conceding, as a backhanded compliment, that OA "may not contain the multitude of human ills". So why bring it up?)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/14/2005 07:46:00 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.
