Bill Hooker, On science and selfishness, Open Reading Frame, March 11, 2009. The context is getting scientists to move from proprietary tools, like Microsoft Word, to open tools like Open Office. But this excerpt is useful well beyond that context:
...In science, only one kind of productivity counts -- that is, keeps you in a job, brings in funding, wins your peers' respect -- and that's published papers. The resulting pressure makes whatever leads to published papers urgent and limits everything else to -- at best -- important; and urgent trumps important every time. Remember the old story about the guy struggling to cut down a tree with a blunt saw? To suggestions that his work would go faster if he sharpened the saw, he replies that he doesn't have time to sit around sharpening tools, he's got a tree to cut down!
I said above that scientists should move from closed to Open wherever possible because of long term advantages. I think that's true, but like the guy with the saw, scientists are caught up in short-term thinking. Put the case to most of them, and they'll agree about the advantages of Open over closed -- for instance, I've yet to meet anyone who disagreed on principle that Open Access could dramatically improve the efficiency of knowledge dissemination, that is, the efficiency of the entire scientific endeavour. I've also yet to meet more than a handful of people willing to commit to sending their own papers only to OA journals, or even to avoiding journals that won't let them self-archive! "I have a job to keep", they say, "I'm not going to sacrifice my livelihood to the greater good"; or "that's great, but first I need to get this grant funded"; or my personal favourite, "once I have tenure I'll start doing all that good stuff". (Sure you will. But I digress.) ...
When it comes to scientists, you don't just have to hand them a sharper saw, you have to force them to stop sawing long enough to change to the new tool. All they know is that the damn tree has to come down on time and they will be in terrible trouble (/fail to be recognized for their genius) if it doesn't.
Comment. When I've said in the past that OA is moving slowly because researchers are preoccupied and overworked, this is 90% of what I meant. Well-put. The other 10%? Researchers are proud to be preoccupied by their research, and skilled at shutting out what they believe to be irrelevant. Their oblivion isn't always absent-mindedness. It's often a cultivated aversion to distraction. Acting on first impressions or hearsay, many of them classify OA with boring and irrelevant developments in the technology of publishing, or worse, the economics of publishing.
Some are ignoring the sharper saw because they're too focused on something else to see what you're offering. Others have already decided it's a ping-pong paddle.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 3/13/2009 01:28:00 PM.
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.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
