[open-science] Publishing and copyright licences: academics opt to keep control | News | Times Higher Education

Thu Apr 4 22:27:55 UTC 2013

On Thu, Apr 4, 2013 at 7:19 PM, Heather Morrison <hgmorris at sfu.ca> wrote:

> Thanks for the pointer, Tom. This survey is interesting from a number of
> perspectives.
>
> First, the fact that this for-profit multinational conglomerate,
> informa.plc, working under its scholar-friendly-sounding 'brand" name
> Taylor & Francis, is conducting social science research which appears to be
> designed to inform public policy, and has control over distribution of
> surveys to 83,000 scholars.
>
> It is completely appropriate for publishers to conduct research to improve
> their services. However, social science research should be conducted by
> social scientists. It is telling that we scholars have given so much power
> to this commercial company that they can now conduct research on us
> scholars in a study of a scale that few social scientists would be able to
> complete with. This is more than a little biased, this is fox researches
> hen research and scholars need to understand that we are the hens in this
> scenario.
>
> I agree that we (or rather our colleagues running universities) have
gifted an extraordinary amount of power to commercial organizations.
Metrics are power and companies will continue to control them. That is why
we have to have bottom-up Open Knowledge

-- 
Peter Murray-Rust
Reader in Molecular Informatics
Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
University of Cambridge
CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069
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