...We need to move beyond something like sustainability - as a guitarist he notes that you have to work your fingers to keep the sustain, not just wait. Sustainability is just the status quo - but we know in our hearts that's not what this is about - we need to be very conscious of the values we want to sustain. And in access to knowledge the status quo is not working - we have degradation in that access.
Sustainability speaks to a business model - which in his business as an academic is the evil twin - what would Socrates have said when asked for a business model? ...
Google has changed the equation in terms of access to knowledge. Google has offered to digitize all back issues of journals, with the journals maintaining the copyright ownership and only showing ads when the journals ok it, and sharing the revenues with the journals when they do. Only one journal in Canada has taken them up on the offer.
The situation is one of corporate concentration. John Wiley just offered to purchase Blackwell. This creates a publishing house of 1200 journals. Reed-Elsevier, 2000 journals, etc. 6000 titles owned by four corporate entities. Libraries are having to buy in bundles of titles, having to sign non-disclosure agreements on the pricing. Only very few of those bundles allow you to cancel single titles.
The effect is on academic freedom - the ability to start, subscribe to, and stop new journals is at the heart of academic freedom....
What does it mean when a journal goes corporate? 45% of journal titles are in corporate hands. When an association's journals go corporate, the price goes up. The scholarly societies don't see a choice - they need support for the electronic distribution of knowledge, and the publishers have very sophisticated mechanisms for that. Ted Bergstrom at UCSB has done work on comparing prices for non-profit vs. commercial journals. He has measured price per citation - in non-profit sector it's $15, in commercial it's $90. The commercialization is increasing cost, and unless budgets are rising that means a reduction in the access to knowledge. But this is in an era where the cost to disseminate knowledge is decreasing....
The principle is to increase access - anything that increases access to knowledge adds to the public good....
Publishers agree that authors have the right to put articles in institutional repositories or faculty web sites. Repositories are the first step - but how do we get people to fill them? Most faculty think publication is the end of the process. But it's to the advantage of the faculty, department, and institution to have the article in the repository - it will increase your citation rate. There are figures that suggest a 40% increase in readership from appearing in open access repositories....
Instead of sustaining the future, we want to envision a better future. We should be willing to create futures that increase access to knowledge.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/08/2006 09:44:00 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.
