Seven years after Open Access was first defined, the concrete realisation of free access to scientific information is beginning to take shape. A variety of paths have been trod along the way. The spectrum ranges from the ideal of "freedom of information" up to merciless commercialisation, for example, through Open Choice programmes by some scientific publishers. Using seven theses, withis paper will show that the "golden road" is the wrong road for the realisation of Open Access, that publishers are by no means the devil in disguise and that scientific communication does not need to be revolutionised by Open Access.
PS: This article seems to be based on Ball's slide presentation from the 5th Frankfurt Scientific Symposium (October 22-23, 2005). At least the slide presentation came first and has a similar title, "Open Access – neither green road nor golden road, is this the road to hell?" I don't have access to the full text of the article, but from the abstract it appears that Ball was much more positive about OA at the time of the presentation, when he concluded that "Everyone's a winner with Open Access."
Update. Ball is the head librarian at the Zentralbibliothek Jülich, a major research institution with an ample budget. One of his theses in the article is that libraries don't need OA. In a blog post on Tuesday, Jürgen Plieninger argues that Ball is out of touch with the needs of university libraries. Four comments support Plieninger's critique and OA. (Thanks to Klaus Graf.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 7/05/2006 09:27:00 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.
