Comments on: Open access: Giving up on a theme?

By: carter glass

carter glass — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 17:15:44 +0000

Give up writing on Open Access? Most definitely. Everything that can be said about open access has been said. My heart sinks each time I see this as an agenda item at conferences. Same story, different Powerpoints.

By: walt crawford

walt crawford — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 19:08:04 +0000

Peter: Thanks. I’ll think about that. I wonder whether I’m doing that effectively any more, which is part of the problem.
(And I wonder whether most scientists will ever care about OA at all, at least until/unless “the university” actually cancels subscriptions they care about…at which point, they’ll take their anger out on the libraries, not the publishers, I fear. Hearing more from scientists since moving my blog and getting involved with FriendFeed has made me wonder more about the efficacy of writing about OA. The term “preaching to the choir” comes to mind… It does seem clear that, at least for many/most scientists, publishing in a journal with a high, if obsolescent, “impact factor” far outweighs any considerations that would favor OA.)

By: Peter Suber

Peter Suber — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 17:00:55 +0000

Hi Walt. I hope you’ll continue to write about OA. I value your OA pieces for several reasons. You have credibility in the library world, and I expect that your pieces have impact there. When you defend OA, or criticize publisher propaganda, you do so from outside the circle of identified partisans. Sometimes pieces by “the usual suspects” are dismissed or skimmed as if they couldn’t possibly say anything new or persuasive. Whether or not those dismissals are justified, it definitely helps to have an OA “independent” working through the same issues and offering another perspective on where the weight of evidence lies.

By: walt crawford

walt crawford — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 03:16:41 +0000

Greg: But here’s the thing: Cites & Insights is not a repository. It’s an ejournal. It’s reasonably widely read within the library field, and it’s primarily for library people. Overall readership is satisfactory… my aim is not to increase readership of the OA sections, particularly in isolation. It’s to see whether I’m having an effect that I’m not aware of. (And, actually, since my primary interest in OA is whether it could free up some library money to use for monographs and the humanities, I’m not sure the essays would resonate with scientists–certainly not with PhysioProf and others who take the same attitude.)

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 01:47:33 +0000

You are possibly missing this: The occasional super duper essay on Open Access can be promoted to the non-librarian world using blogging mojo, so that this discussion does broaden and deepen. Get a list of bloggers … start with bora and me … maybe between eight and twenty of them, and once a month send them an email asking to promote a particular essay. You’ll at least get a couple of hundred people looking at it.
Then, your repository will increase in value overall becaue of crosslinking and general increased readership of your blog(s).

By: walt crawford

walt crawford — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 19:10:04 +0000

Kate: Thanks for that. Selective citation and commentary will continue to be a big part of C&I; if I drop OA, that will leave room & time for other areas.
I don’t claim to be unbiased regarding OA. I’ve tried to state my biases, and I do have them. I do try to cite & comment transparently, though.

By: Kate W

Kate W — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 06:04:12 +0000

I always like the OA articles, frankly. They’re about the only information about OA that I find interesting to read and unbiased. However, since I am a librarian working in a field mostly unaffected by OA (because school librarians rarely have access to any sort of scholarship, or any way to implement something they’ve read about that deviates from the Ed Status Quo) so you needent listen to me.
I freely admit that I often use C&I as a way to have someone else select from the literature and blogs issues I’ll find of interest. Especially now that the school year has begun again.