As the editor of an online journal, I am biased in favor of open access, and one of the frustrating aspects of the Historical Statistics of the United States-Millennial Edition (HSUS-ME) is their hard-copy business model, which relied on an old assumption: you get an agreement with a publisher for an expensive project, maybe enough of an advance to pay contributors a pittance, and then sell hard copies to libraries at exhorbitant rates to justify the project. Cambridge University Press added on a pay-per-view model. For example, if you head towards the historical statistics on education, you get asked for $6 for 48-hour access.
For many, that's not a bad deal. Pay, zip in, suck up the tables while you have access, and go. But think of who this leaves out: schoolkids whose parents don't have acces to $6. You want to give students the sense that history is beyond their reach? Put things behind a subscription wall. Fortunately, the American Memory Project of the Library of Congress, along with dozens of other sites, show that there is a way to provide access to historical materials (and I consider statistics part of that-see the Integrated Public Use Microdata Sample website for an example-their business model is "get grants; do work; make it available to the world for free"). For goodness' sake: many of the source materials for HSUS-ME come from the Census Bureau and other agencies which throw terabytes of data online for public consumption. And HSUS-ME is behind a subscription wall? To quote from a Christine Lavin song, "What were they thinking?" ...
Fortunately, there are other options [than Wikipedia]. Online refereed encyclopedias for narrow topics, the reference equivalent to online journals, could allow anyone to submit an article that would be vetted by an editorial board. The versions would be (like Wikipedia) open to comment and discussion, but there would be editorial control....I have my hands full with current obligations, but I'd love for others to run with this one. Go collect enough of an editorial board to run the project, get someone to fund the copyediting if you can (such as scholarly societies), and then visit the Open Journal Systems website (free online-journal system) and see if that might work for you. (I can think of at least two ways to tweak that into an encyclopedia-friendly form.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/25/2006 06:24:00 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.
