Ross Scaife, Taking a wrong turn at the APA, The Stoa Consortium, December 8, 2004. Excerpt: 'An earlier post to this blog summarizes new NEH-funded work on the problems of digitizing Latin incunabula. The project will disseminate its results very broadly, through publication of data on freely accessible sites like Perseus and in other university digital libraries, application of extremely liberal Creative Commons licenses to program code, and so forth. In taking this approach, Rydberg-Cox and his colleagues have lots of company: a strong consensus has long since formed among classicists with the greatest relevant expertise that Open Access methods represent "best practice" in our field. Experiences from a full decade of scholarly electronic publication online have demonstrated that we can now reach a huge international audience that’s eager for the resources (texts, images, tools, analyses) we can make available concerning the ancient world. Against that background, the recent APA [American Philological Association] decision to create a members-only portion of its web site strikes me as an obvious mistake. I believe that what the APA has done represents an unimaginative and inadequate response to the opportunities afforded us in our networked world.' (PS: In the members-only section, APA members can find the APA journal, which members already receive in print form, book-discount offers, and certain documents and details for future APA business meetings.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/10/2004 08:31:00 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.
