[Open-access] Crowdsourcing request + BMJ OA Policy

Mon Mar 24 13:24:02 UTC 2014

On Monday, March 24, 2014, 10:53:59 AM, you wrote:

> That's why publishers so often do things that we hate: the
> fundamentally do not want what we want. It's that simple.

Precisely!

In fact, after Richard's interview, I'm seriously considering phasing out all editorial support I've given the new startup publishers. It was fun and some of them were/are very innovative and full of smart and dedicated people.

But in the end, I'm slowly starting to realize that it only increases the Balkanization of our infrastructure. Moreover, as we see now, the constant, ongoing license debates will not go away - in fact the more publishers and journals we have, the worse it will be as we'd have to take on every single one of them! And the news this morning about retracting a paper for legal reasons by Frontiers: I mean, that sort of thing just opens so many doors, it seems like if we continue to go down this road of ever more publishers and ever more journals each and everyone doing what they want, soon we'll be bogged down completely just to patch up all the different holes that start springing up all over the place.

Technically, taking care that text, data and code are accessible and re-usable is a piece of cake. Do we really want to spend our time telling others how to do it right, correcting them only to then turn around and do the same thing all over again, ad adfinitum, rather than getting it right to begin with?

Bjoern

-- 
Björn Brembs
---------------------------------------------
http://brembs.net
Neurogenetics
Universität Regensburg
Germany