Open Access: Which Side Are You On. Three Things Students Can Do Now to Promote Open Access. The open access movement is a long-standing campaign in the world of research to make scholarly works freely available and reusable. One of its fundamental premises is that the progress of knowledge and culture happens scholarly works of all kinds are widely shared, not hidden in ivory towers built with paywalls and shorn by harsh legal regimes. Scholarly journal publishers currently compile research done by professors (for free), send articles out to be peer reviewed (for free), and distribute the edited journals back to universities around the world (for costs anywhere up to $35,000 each).
Subscription prices have outpaced inflation by over 250 percent in the past 30 years, and these fees go straight to the publisher. Neither the authors nor their institutions are paid a cent, and the research itself—which is largely funded by taxpayers—remains difficult to attain. The good news is that the open access movement is changing all this, and you can help. If you have 10 minutes... Open Access: 'we no longer need expensive publishing networks' | Higher Education Network | Guardian Professional. Academics are creating open access models of their own. Photograph: Jan Stromme/Getty Images While academia is in the midst of a general funding crisis, multinational publishing houses are making vast profits from disseminating publicly funded research.
New open access publishing models provide cost-efficient methods for disseminating research findings, eradicate excess profits by publishers and massively widen the readership of scholarly works. The government recognises this but their current reform agenda is nowhere near bold enough. Academics as a rule do not write their books to make money – in fact most receive only token royalties for their work. Commercial publishers reap high profits while putting up several barriers to dissemination of research results.
We have reached a point where university libraries cannot afford to buy access to the research done by scholars in their own institutions as journal costs are now too expensive even for the wealthiest universities. Open Access and its impact on the future of the university librarian | Higher Education Network | Guardian Professional. With the publication of the Finch report earlier this year and the UK government's announcement to commit £10m to help make research findings freely available, there has been a gear shift towards a more rapid movement into an open access world for the publishing of scholarly information. While there has been a lot of discussion around what that shift means for academic publishers, and there is now a lively dialogue between researchers and scholars in different disciplines, there seems to have been less discussion of what this shift means for libraries and librarians.
Yet the move towards open access is a profound change for the whole infrastructure of scholarly communication, and is bound to have impacts on the library as it does on other parts of the process. At SAGE, we are interested in understanding the long term impacts of changes in scholarly communication on all of its traditional stakeholders. ‘Open Science’ Challenges Journal Tradition With Web Collaboration. For centuries, this is how science has operated — through research done in private, then submitted to science and medical journals to be reviewed by peers and published for the benefit of other researchers and the public at large. But to many scientists, the longevity of that process is nothing to celebrate. The system is hidebound, expensive and elitist, they say. Peer review can take months, journal subscriptions can be prohibitively costly, and a handful of gatekeepers limit the flow of information.
It is an ideal system for sharing knowledge, said the quantum physicist Michael Nielsen, only “if you’re stuck with 17th-century technology.” Dr. Nielsen and other advocates for “open science” say science can accomplish much more, much faster, in an environment of friction-free collaboration over the Internet.
Open-access archives and journals like arXiv and the Public Library of Science (PLoS) have sprung up in recent years. Dr. Facebook for Scientists? “I want to make science more open. Open access journals: are we asking the right questions? | Higher Education Network. A mass online movement to boycott the academic publisher Elsevier has emerged over the past week. This has come about through a growing awareness among researchers and scholars that their output is being sold back to their own institutions at prohibitive costs.
The proposed solution is an open access model. Of course, this effort is to be applauded: the profit markups on academic publishing are extraordinary. However, there is a danger here, which Thomas Pynchon referred to in his 1973 novel, Gravity's Rainbow: "If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers". In some ways, we have been asking the wrong questions of academic publishing for some time. While the economic arguments are striking, the presupposition has been that research output remains an untainted utopia somehow perverted by greedy publishers unable to adapt to the workings of the brave new internet world. What, then, are the problems with this model?
Why the former? The Importance of Open Access: An Interview with Patient Advocate Graham Steel. A native of Glasgow, Scotland, Graham Steel is a longtime “Guest Researcher Member” of PatientsLikeMe. Following the death of his brother Richard at the age of 33 from a rare condition known as variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD), Graham became involved in patient advocacy work, and most recently, in lobbying for open access to published scientific research. Find out how this active blogger and Tweeter developed a passion for data sharing in our interview below. 1. Tell us how you first got involved in patient advocacy work. As per my PatientsLikeMe profile, this started in 2001. I’m a great believer in complete openness and transparency as anyone who knows me in real life or via the Internet knows. 2. I am not 100% sure where I first found out about PatientsLikeMe but it was most probably via the main ALS TDI Forum. The PatientsLikeMe platform itself has expanded in many ways since 2007. 3.
“Why is OA important to patients?” And… 4. The Internet, Open Data and The Semantic Web. Tout se passe comme si » Publications en libre accès : Dépêches du front. Cliquez pour voir l'original Comme Tom Roud le notait il y a quelques temps, il y a un conflit de plus en plus ouvert entre certains scientifiques et certains éditeurs de journaux scientifiques. Cette discussion est en partie liée aux différents modèles de publication, mais il y a plus.
Comme je le notait aussi dans un ancien billet, les seuls profits des éditeurs privés pourraient couvrir la publication libre d’accès pour tous. Pas le chiffre d’affaires remarquez, les profits. On va y revenir. Le débat récent est très bien résumé par Tom Roud, donc je ne vais pas détailler, sinon pour dire que j’ai partagé à 200% le choc de Tom face au cynisme affiché des éditeurs, qui prétendent apporter la valeur ajoutée de la recherche scientifique. Un truc qui m’a frappé, et j’ai beaucoup suivi cette histoire, c’est que les réactions des représentants des éditeurs, et de personnes apparemment sincères qui y travaillent, sur des blogs, sur twitter, etc, montrent qu’ils sont complètement à la rue. Scientific publishing: Brought to book.