Heather Morrison, What if..., Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics, November 28, 2005. Excerpt:
The human genome sequence is freely downloadable from Genbank and the European Bioinformatics Institute - thanks to the efforts of early open access pioneers. What is this had not been the case?
Imagine that various different learned societies each ended up with the rights to a chunk of chromosome, and sold access rights to the DNA sequence in order to fund their charitable activities.
One can only imagine the furore that would have blown up if it had then been proposed to open up access to the DNA sequences.
Instead of an open access environment which allows all of humankind to put all of our greatest assets - the 6 billion or so human minds on the planet - into advancing medical knowledge, we could have had dollars for a few, comfortable conferences and lectures for the wealthy, and exclusion for everyone else.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/29/2005 09:33:00 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.
