Daniel Greenstein, Not so quiet on a Western front, Nature, May 28, 2004. Excerpt: "I believe that the business model of commercial publishing, which once served the academy's information needs, now threatens fundamentally to undermine and pervert the course of research and teaching. Put bluntly, the model is economically unsustainable for us. If business as usual continues, it will deny scholars both access to the information they need and the ability to distribute their work to the worldwide audience it deserves....Will author charges sustain high-quality peer reviewed [open-access] publications? Perhaps not. But surely the combination of uncertainty and hope associated with this unproven model is vastly superior to the certainty and hopelessness that surrounds the current and failed commercial one....In this regard, is it not more appropriate to view the current Open Access business model as a starting point and catalyst for change rather than as a static form? Will the model work outside a small number of scientific disciplines? It may not, but should we not be encouraging various approaches, so long as each meets a range of agreed criteria concerning, for example, quality (peer review), price, facility of production, accessibility, interoperability and persistence?"
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/28/2004 11:48:00 AM.
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.
