Dorothea Salo, Why I Am The Enemy, Caveat Lector, December 15, 2006. Excerpt:
...I am the enemy because I will become a publisher. Not just “can” become, will become. And I’ll do it without letting go of librarianship, its mission and its ethics —and publishers may think they have my mission and my ethics, but they’re often wrong. Think I can’t compete? Watch me cut off your air supply over the course of my career (and I have 30-odd years to go, folks; don’t think you’re getting rid of me in any hurry). Just watch....
There’s been a bit of a dust-up between Jan Velterop and Stevan Harnad over (you guessed, right?) green versus gold open access. I’m going to break a streak here and say that Harnad is right and Velterop wrong. Researchers do not have nearly the duty to journals qua journals that they do to their own careers and the wider dissemination of knowledge, and they have absolutely zero duty to journal publishers. Who serves whom here?
The problem with Velterop’s argument, to my mind at least, is that it presumes that breaking up the current journal-publishing system while we work on something else is a near-fatal blow to the scholarly-publishing mission. I find that a ludicrous notion. We’re smart people, here in libraries, and the researchers we serve aren’t stupid either. If and when Elseviley Verlag breaks up, we’ll find a way (probably many ways) to pick up the slack. In my meaner moments, I rather suspect this argument gets trotted out because nobody wants us to realize that Elseviley Verlag doesn’t contribute as much as they’d like us to believe.
About which, see above about me becoming a publisher-librarian. It’ll happen. I daresay I’ll even be good at it. And yes, Elseviley Verlag should fear me and my kind. If nothing else, we can’t be any slower than the current system!
Update (December 17, 2006). See Jan Velterop's comment on Dorothea's post.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/16/2006 11:49:00 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.
