Subscription models make publishers insist on controlling access to research they didn't perform, write up, or fund. They act like a midwives who insist on keeping (or hiding, or performing surgery on) other folks' babies.
Suber's a policy analyst on open access to scientific and scholarly research literature. He's also a Senior Researcher at SPARC, and publisher of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter.
Taxpayers pony up $28 billion annually for NIH to fund medical research, resulting in 60,000 annual published studies. First beneficiaries of that knowledge aren't doctors or patients, but journals that are prohibitively expensive for many.
A new metrics in the works...instead of "impact factor", try "usage factor?" A majority of publishers in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) appear to support "UF."
"Academic literature should be freely available: developing countries need access; part time ... thinkers ... journalists and the public can benefit; ... you’ve already paid for much of this stuff with your taxes ... important new ideas from humanity"
Imagine a library that collected all the world's information about all the world's books and made it available for everyone to view and update. We're building that library.
When people speak of open source software they are referring to computer code - programs that run. But code is only the final step in the information technology process. Prior to writing code the information technology professional must do analysis to determine the nature of the problem to be solved and the best way to solve it. When software projects fail, the failure is more often than not attributable to shortcomings in the planning and analysis phase rather than in the coding itself. Open source software provides some particular challenges for planning since the code itself will be worked on by different programmers and will evolve over time. The success of an open source project will clearly depend on the clarity of the shared vision of the goals of the software and some strong definitions of basic functions and how they will work. This all-important work of defining often takes place through standards and the development of standards that everyone can use has become a movement in itself: open standards.
S. Vahdati, N. Arndt, S. Auer, and C. Lange. Proceedings of 20th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (EKAW'2016), 10024, Heidelberg, Springer Verlag, (November 2016)
S. Vahdati, N. Arndt, S. Auer, and C. Lange. Proceedings of 20th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (EKAW'2016), (November 2016)