Well, here's something that really makes my blood curdle. The Royal Society has taken a stand against open access journals. Their argument is the standard one that confuses means with ends. The presence of these free journals will make it less likely that scientists will pay high prices for paper ones. Therefore, we must eliminate the open access journals to protect the proprietary ones. It's really sad for me to see the Royal Society lumbering on like all the other dinosaurs. After all, the historically revolutionized scientific discourse by offering the first real scientific journal, Philosohpical Transactions, and made every effort to get that journal into the hands of scientists everywhere --even "foreign" ones....They were also converting science from one of secrecy to one of full disclosure (making a gamble that scientists would trade their knowledge for good publicity and notoriety).
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/27/2005 10:06:00 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.
