[Open-access] An anti-RWA bill

Tue Jan 31 14:16:47 UTC 2012

On Tue, Jan 31, 2012 at 13:32, Mike Taylor <mike at indexdata.com> wrote:
> Everything you say is true.
>
> But.
>
> It's a question of strategy.  How we get there from here.

Exactly.  Also: there are multiple interested parties, and this is a
simple agenda which could unite them as a broad alliance.  For
instance, my main interest is in broad access for reading the
literature, so that I - and other interested members of the public -
can read it.  I don't care so much about the license (except for
ideological reasons).  Text-mining semantic web types care very much
about the license - they need to be able to process papers, not just
read them - but might care less about the business model (for
instance, they might be affiliated with an institution which could pay
an access fee, if a publisher had a business model which allowed
text-mining for a fee).  An individual researcher writing a paper
wants more readers but is likely to be quite conservative about change
(for good career reasons: they need to worry about impact factors,
citation counts, and so on).  A politician might only care about the
optics and the sound-bite ("you paid for this work with your tax
dollars but they lock it away from you...").  An entrepreneurial
publisher might be interested in an OA business model which allows
them to massively undercut Elsevier/Springer/NPG and grab
market-share.  A librarian or institutional leader wants to cut costs
but worries about unforseen consequences of revolutionary change.

All these different people can get behind a universal OA mandate for
taxpayer-funded science, especially now that the RWA and the
anti-Elsevier campaign have brought the subject to the top of the
agenda and highlighted the ridiculous imbalances in the current
system.  But many of them might be wary of, or opposed to, a campaign
to abandon the journal system altogether.

If you set out to go far, nobody comes with you.  Take a single step,
and many people might step forward too.

This was the same sort of question I faced with the Science Code
Manifesto.  It's obvious to me that all science software should be,
and one day will be, open-source.  But I want to gather signatures and
support from people who have never even heard of "open source", and
from people who have vague misconceptions about "intellectual
property", and from people who don't know or care about the network
and productivity benefits of open-source.  So the Manifesto doesn't
say, or imply, open source, and the arguments I use for it are mostly
concerned with fundamental scientific-method principles.
-- 
Nick Barnes, Climate Code Foundation, http://climatecode.org/