There is a fascinating front-page article in Monday’s Wall Street Journal on the tussle between publishers and academics over open-access journals. The gist: There is a move a-foot to abandon expensive journals from publishers like Reed-Elsevier and others in favor of web-based journals — and databases — from which people can freely read the latest and greatest research.
This has been going on for some time, predating the arrival of arxiv and its ilk. But it is a fascinating issue, one that can be viewed from both high-minded and less charitable perspectives.
From a high-minded point-of-view, this is all about science. Innovation and the growth of knowledge work best when researchers can see what other researchers are doing — when they can build on one another. Call it open-source science. While that has been assisted by the networked world of the web, the web has equally reminded many researchers how much there is out there that they cannot cost-effectively access, thus limiting science’s advance, thus hurting society. Q.E.D., journals should be free.
From a less high-minded perspective, cash-strapped universities have found a wedge issue to solve a problem that they created. First they insisted that faculty seeking tenure had to publish in top journals. Then, of course, top journals realized they were in the driver’s seat, so they ratcheted up subscription prices, knowing full well that universities had created a monster. Because universities could hardly turn around and tell people to publish elsewhere: They had told them to publish in top-tier journals.
So what could the universities do? What they did was elevate a few web utopians and malcontents to Academic Idol status by using their drive for open-access journals as a bargaining chip in beating down the high prices of academic journals. Do universities administrators really believe in open-access journals? To this way of thinking, of course not. This is just real politik, with your average vice-chancellor unable to tell the difference between arxiv.org and archive.org.
The reality: This is a big issue, one made pressing by open-source science, but it is much more complex than some utopian quest for better science, let alone silly memes like “information wants to be free”.
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Some of my fave apps came from SourceForge, and at my favorite price. Could not live without those apps.
But a bit of code is one thing, and a research paper that one stakes a reputation on, could be a different deal.
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