The June issue of Wired Magazine has an interesting article about Nobel Prize winning scientist and academic leader Harold Varmus, titled Free Radical. Varmus’ controversial position is that publishing should be free and open in the scientific and academic community. I agree with him, although this position is a radical departure from the traditional conception academics and scientific researchers have had of elite, peer reviewed journals whose subscriptions can be QUITE expensive...
Not surprisingly, many (if not most) scientific researchers and others in “the academy” oppose this move against tradition and established practice....
If you want to be relevant, your ideas not only have to be digital- they also need to be OPENLY accessible to the world on the Web. Lots of folks will fight this future, but I think it is a future we should embrace and actively support as we move forward in the 21st century.
Comment. Just one correction: There's no evidence that researchers oppose OA. Studies (one, two) show that researchers are not very familiar with OA and either lack time or fear that they lack time to try it out. Support is very high among researchers who know much about it. By contrast, scientific societies that publish journals often oppose OA, and are often taken to be speaking for their members when they are really speaking for their publishing arms. I don't know a single case in which a scientific society has based its opposition to OA on a vote of its members.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/21/2006 11:42:00 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.
