Open Access News

I recently noted, on another site, that a recent study by the Centre for Information Behaviour and the Evaluation of Research (CIBER) in England found that 96.2% preferred the "closed source" process of peer review over the "open source" process of open access, when evaluating the worth of academic papers. Rather than throw things on the Web and let a consensus emerge, in other words, researchers prefer having a few known authorities inspect the work before it's published by a known press. The credibility of authority, both the reviewer and the journal, are seen as more valid than the credibility of consensus. But look inside that study again.

Nearly half believed that open access (OA) publishing would undermine the current system, with 41% saying that would be a good thing.

Despite the spin being placed on these numbers, in other words, the barbarians are truly at the gates, they're inside the wall, and they might be having a drink at the next table. The fact is that while "open source has no quality control," as the headline writer put it in David Coursey's recent column, authority is no longer all it's cracked up to be. Authority can be corrupt. Authority can be an excuse for not thinking. Authority may say there are weapons of mass destruction or that oral sex isn't sex. Letting the light in is not anarchy. A demand of consensus is not mob rule. It's the scientific method in action.

(PS: I appreciate that Blankenhorn is defending OA, but he perpetuates a harmful misunderstanding of OA by giving the impression that OA rejects peer review or that it entails peer-review reform and favors informal methods like those at Wikipedia. First, OA is about removing access barriers to peer-reviewed research, not about bypassing peer review. Second, removing access barriers and reforming peer review are independent projects. OA is compatible with every kind of peer review, from the most new and innovative to the most conservative and traditional.)

Update. Blankenhorn continues his defense of OA in a December 14 posting to Moore's Lore, this time without touching on peer-review issues. Excerpt:

Academic journals cost very little to print or distribute. They are produced, in fact, by researchers who agree to be part of the peer-review process. They are a bottleneck through which knowledge must pass before the rest of us get a crack at it. Yet these same journals are owned by for-profit publishers, who keep raising their prices, forcing universities to pay for them, often with government money....When private companies are allowed to gain monopoly profits, often paid-for by government funds, and act as a bottleneck to knowledge, something is clearly very wrong. With apologies to Bergstrom and McAfee there are, in fact, several things schools could do: [1] They could create competitors to the privately-run journals. [2] They could demand payment for their professors' work on those journals, as the authors suggest. [3] They could create a new method, acceptable to them, for creating peer-review products that are published online. That unavailable Library Journal article is a Clue. If you want to restrict access to academic journals, either before or after they've edited and approved a paper, you can do that. The Internet provides a highly flexible system, with a highly flexible set of business models, for doing that. Just stop making this refusal to consider "open access" and continue the present system as some kind of stand on principle. It is an economic issue. You're coddling monopolists.