Bobby Pickering, A soap opera storyline ends, Information World Review, August 30, 2006. Pickering is leaving IWR and reflects on some of the big issues he's covered in his three years there as editor. Excerpt:
The open access movement made an impact, but not as much as I expected. It will undoubtedly continue to be corrosive, as the rivals parry and thrust over the big pot of gold to be made from publicly funded research. Government committees have become involved and hearings have been held, in the US, UK and Europe - all very exciting stuff!
Comment. Just to clarify: There's a huge pot of money spent on scholarly journals every year (I've seen estimates in the $12 billion range). But those working for OA to publicly-funded research and, if successful, those hosting it, will not make any money from it. There's money to be made from some kinds of OA journals (BMC and Hindawi are for-profit publishers and Hindawi is already profitable), but all national policies aimed at OA for publicly-funded research focus on OA repositories, not OA journals.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 8/31/2006 02:52:00 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.
