February 22, 2008
Will Open-Access Publishing Free Enslaved Academics?
Is the movement toward free and open access to published material a human-rights issue? Richard Smith says it is. The former editor of the British journal BMJ is on the Board of Directors of the Public Library of Science, a nonprofit group that publishes journal articles online and makes them freely available to the public.
In a talk last year at a publishing conference, Mr. Smith said the push toward open access was analogous to Britian’s abolitionist movement in the late 18th century. The slave traders of that time are like today’s traditional publishers, he said. The slaves are akin to research articles and academics, and the abolitionists are open-access activists like Stevan Harnad, a cognitive scientist; Harold Varmus, a Nobel laureate; and Paul Ginsparg, a Cornell University physicist. —Andrea L. Foster
Posted on Friday February 22, 2008 | Permalink |Comments
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PARA COMPARTIR CON MICHAEL?
— Ricardo Feb 22, 05:36 PM #
The “organization man” in the “dull suit” type of academic will wither, career-wise, as his mind has preceded to do. We may be left with people who can actually think.
— Richard Tabor Greene Feb 22, 07:59 PM #
Good point, Richard. Should the “organization man” whither in academe, hope may prevail for thinking. I hope this comes to fruition. And may that create the “perfect storm” to eliminate that same man in corporations as well. Mankind may indeed then survive ignorance and intolerance. Long live open access.
— Mike J. Feb 23, 03:21 AM #
Workman, Blame Not Thy Tools
The slavery analogy is rather too severe. So are the analogies with the pharmaceutical, oil and tobacco industry that have been used now and then. The industrial lobbying and FUD against OA has been shrill and shifty, but not quite sinister or inhumane. Mostly, it has been transparently hyperbolic, ineffectual, and even pathetic, and prominently exposed as such. After all, the publisher lobbying and FUD have all failed, resoundingly (and over 60% of journals have gone Green — and 15% of them Gold — of their own accord).
And let’s not forget that there were other culpable parties in the far too slow transition to the optimal and inevitable , most prominent among them being the researchers themselves, the very ones who create this peculiar author give-away literature, written only for research impact rather than royalty income. Historians will have to note that in the end it required mandates from their institutions and funders to induce researchers at long last to do what was fully within their reach all along, and in their own best interests, as well as in those of their institutions, their funders, the vast R&D industry, and the tax-paying public that supports their research…
Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum
— Stevan Harnad Feb 23, 07:48 PM #
Let’s see if Mr. Smith changes his tune when, down the line, he and his colleagues are scrambling to find money to pay the charges that places like PLoS require to get published. Stevan Harnad expects those funds to come from libraries’ savings on journal subscriptions. Don’t count on it. University administrators who have commented on the likelihood of this transfer, like James O’Donnell, have said as much.
— Sandy Thatcher Feb 25, 10:42 AM #
I agree that the analogies to the slave trade are over-reaching — in the same way that the publishers’ cries are over-reaching. I’ve envied the shift to open access publications in the sciences for a while now, and wished for something like the “Public Library of the Humanities.”
Most of the significant moves, so far, seem to be institutionally-driven, with first MIT and then Harvard leading the way in terms of making fundamentally large amounts of significant materials available freely to anyone with an internet connection — and let’s please remember that that connection itself is not free and that there are still things to worry about in terms of control of “the pipes” (as AT&T likes to say).
I also know that a number of individual scholars have made steps in this direction, usually through their own sites or spaces. Here’s hoping that some sort of inter-institutional organization gets created — a la PLoS — for a broader range of materials.
I say that, in part, because of the funding issues involved, as the comment above notes. I am not, I should note, as pessimistic about the possibilities, but I do think that when we forget about revenues and expenditures, we end up with something inherently untenable.
— John Laudun Feb 25, 10:57 AM #
It seems to me that we need to disentangle the “peer-review” aspect of publication from the “paid subscription” aspect, and that further, this may not be too difficult. As a reviewer for several academic journals, I am never paid. I also edit a peer-reviewed online journal. It seems the main costs of web-publication are modest sums for the editors, and a grad assistant to track manuscripts and do final formatting and posting (most universities host faculty-related websites for free). These do not seem so exorbitant that the sponsoring institution or professional group could not cover them.
On the other hand, I would not like to see academia move to a totally “open” publication norm, meaning anyone just posts their research report on some big institutional website, without some sort of peer review process. There is already enough junk on the Web, and not enough time to sort the good from the bad. I know some pretty lousy stuff has made it through peer review, and undoubtedly some wonderful, cutting edge research has been turned down, but it’s the best method of certifying what is worth spending time reading that we’ve got right now.
— Nancy Feb 25, 02:15 PM #
In further irritating analogies, Mr. Smith compared the whipping of slaves to those who would use non-felt bookmarks; the burning of slaves’ feet to putting hot coffee down on a book; and the savage rape of slave women to someone keeping a loaned book. In perhaps his most vomitous analogy, Mr. Smith concluded that today’s public libraries are much like the slave auctions of yesteryear. His remarks drew polite applause by the idiot intelligensia that attended the meeting.
— marci Feb 25, 06:42 PM #
marci … did you read the actual article? That would help.
— John Laudun Feb 25, 10:59 PM #