[Open-access] Well, this is unexpected!

Tue Feb 28 11:47:34 UTC 2012

On 28 February 2012 11:41, Björn Brembs <b.brembs at googlemail.com> wrote:
>> That isn't necessarily a point we need to make -- we can just start talking that
>> way as though it's always been assumed.  "Like other publishers, IRs
>> make works available under some specific licence; unlike many other
>> publishers, that licence is often permissive."  That kind of thing.
>
> In fact, that's one of the things which beg the question:
> what do we need 'real' publishers for?
>
> Shouldn't this question be solved first? I still have never
> gotten a satisfying answer.

Again, this is a matter of strategy.  I am open to a world where there
is nothing that resembles what we currently think of as a "publisher".
 But if we push that notion from the start, rather than going for
incremental but important change of publishers that seem to publish
rather than hide content, we simply will not be able to take a
critical mass of academics with us.  Even now I know a lot of
colleagues who, while sharing our distaste of the status quo, fear
something as exotic as an open-access publisher like PLoS.  It's just
not realistic to expect those people to swing behind an initiative
that will throw EVERYTHING up in the air at once.

Incremental changes are the only way to go.  (And even then it isn't
really incremental: cancelling Elsevier subscriptions will be a
catastrophic event for most libraries.)

-- Mike.