Posted on July 30, 2016  Comments (2)

As I have written many times in the past we need to take back science from the closed-science journals. Historically journals were useful (before the internet). With the advent of the internet (and its spread) instead of maintaining the mission they started with the journals sought to maximize their profit and their own pay and jobs at the expense of sharing scientific knowledge with the world.

Elsevier — my part in its downfall by Timothy Gowers provides another good look at what can be done to promote science, math and engineering by addressing the damage to that goal being done by closed science publishers.

Recently he announced the launch of Discrete Analysis, a new journal that publishes to arXiv.

Disrupting the subscription journals’ business model for the necessary large-scale transformation to open access from the Max Planck Digital Library provides some good ideas for how to promote science in spite of the closed science journals fighting that goal.

Related: The Architecture of Access to Scientific Knowledge – Why Copyright Extension is a Very Bad Idea – Publishers Continue to Fight Open Access to Science (2007) – Harvard Steps Up Defense Against Abusive Journal Publishers (2012)