Curious Cat Science and Engineering Blog » Publishers Continue to Fight Open Access to Science

September 21, 2007

Publishers Continue to Fight Open Access to Science

Publishers prepare for war over open access

On one side are the advocates of open-access journals - publications that make academic papers freely available and recoup costs by charging authors to publish. The model seems increasingly successful. New open-access journals are springing up weekly and could gain support if the US acts on plans make all its publicly funded health research freely available via a government archive.

Lined up against them are the academic publishers. The idea of open-access journals is frightening for an industry whose profits are based on subscription charges.
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Dezenhall’s strategy includes linking open access with government censorship and junk science – ideas that to me seem quite bizarre and misleading. Last month, however, the AAP launched a lobby group called the Partnership for Research Integrity in Science & Medicine (PRISM), which uses many of the arguments that Dezenhall suggested.

It is sad to see journals that were founded to promote science so flawed in their thinking today. As I said last month in Science Journal Publishers Stay Stupid: “It is time for the scientific community to give up on these journals and start looking to move to work with new organizations that will encourage scientific communication and advancement (PLoS - arXiv.org - Open Access Engineering Journals) and leave those that seek to keep outdated practices to go out of business.” Organizations can’t ignore principles when choosing tactics. Tactics that might be ok in other situations, should not be acceptable to scientists publishing scientific information. When journals move to harm science to preserve their outdated business practices they deserve to lose the respect of scientists.

by curiouscat Tags: Open Access, Science, Students
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2 Responses to “Publishers Continue to Fight Open Access to Science”

CuriousCat: Open Access Legislation in the HHS Budget Bill Says:
November 10th, 2007 at 12:26 pm
The opponents of open science are lobbying to keep scientific research funded by taxpayers unavailable to the public. As I have said before it is time to stop supporting those who attempt to stop scientific progress…
CuriousCat: Open Source - The Scientific Model Applied to Programming Says:
December 1st, 2007 at 10:42 am
“Simply put, free and open-source software is just the scientific model applied to programming: free sharing of work open collaboration; open publication; peer review; recognition of the best work…”