Comment. Bacher's doubts about OA would carry more weight if he didn't misunderstand OA so frequently. (1) OA advocates do not say that all scholarly information should be free. The focus of the OA movement is on scholarship for which authors do not expect to be paid, such as journal articles. (2) OA advocates do not say that OA literature is costless to produce or that its production costs do not need to be recovered. Nor do they say that funding or subsidy opportunities are the same in every field; on the contrary. (3) It's not true that "easy retrieval" of OA literature "is not available". OA literature is much easier to discover and retrieve than TA literature; that's the point. Literature in OAI-compliant repositories is indexed by OAI-compliant search engines like OAIster and is increasingly being indexed by mainstream search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Scirus. (4) OA advocates object to six-month embargoes as much as Bacher does. OA advocates are battling the embargoes, not erecting them. (5) OA is not about bypassing peer review. It's about removing access barriers to peer-reviewed research.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/03/2006 10:24:00 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.
