To mark Open Access Week 2014, here are some links to relevant content:
In this blog
- An overview of open access publishing;
- A list of myths about Open Access, according to Peter Suber, the director of the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication;
Elsewhere on the web:
- A video explaining the Open Access publishing model, by PhD Comics;
- A discussion of how Open Access enhances academic freedom, by Curt Rice, the head of the Board for Current Research Information System in Norway;
- Some refreshingly candid remarks on the cost of knowledge, by Leszek Borysiewicz, the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge;
- Remarks on how Open Access can enhance public engagement with science, by Richard Price, the founder of academia.edu;
- A report on the economics of Open Access publishing, by Ernesto Priego, Lecturer in Library Science at City University London;
- A report on how the Directory of Open Access Journals attempted to purge questionable journals from its index.
Some concluding thoughts
In lieu of a conclusion, I would like to share some questions which I still have about open access and academic publishing in general:
- To what extent can the cost of access to knowledge be justified in terms of the services that academic publisher’s provide?
- To what extent can the Article Processing Charges (e.g., 1, 2, 3, 4) be justified in terms of the services that Open Access / hybrid publishers provide?
- Is enough being done to protect Open Access from its reputational association with predatory publishering?
- What can be done to ensure that authors from low-resource research contexts are not disadvantaged by the requirement to procure funds in order to get published?
- What can be done to safeguard against the conflict of interest that may arise when a publisher, who stands to gain directly by publishing an article is also entrusted with the peer-review process?
Featured Image: “Open Access promomateriaal”, by biblioteekje @ Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
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