Events for National Day of Action for Open Access

February 15th, 2007 by Gavin Baker

Get ready! Thursday, Feb. 15 is the National Day of Action for Open Access. Several of our chapters across the country will be hosting events — here they are:

The following chapters have also said they’d be participating — contact them for details:

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“From the trenches”

February 9th, 2007 by Asheesh Laroia

This past Monday, I had a chance a chance to give academic publishers a piece of my mind.

The Professional and Scholarly Publishing division of AAP held a pre-conference meeting that Monday to talk about the way technology, specifically “Web 2.0″, was affecting the way students consume and use academic content. They asked Sayeed Choudhury from the JHU libraries to find a few students who might be able to give them a student’s perspective; he brought me, a history post-doctoral student, and another computer science grad student. The event’s name was “From the trenches”.

We each had a few minutes to talk before we would each be inundated with questions. It was a very active, interested group attending our panel, and I really appreciated that. I made a couple of points, but I want to first highlight one thing that we at FreeCulture.org have been thinking a lot about lately.

That is, of course, Open Access. I believe that the public has a right to read the research it pays for with tax dollars. I further believe that as we start to taste what open access is like, pressure will come from the demand side. At lunch, I talked with an editor of a smallish journal on clinical oncology, and he said that neither he nor the people whose work he was publishing cared much about the access model, so they just did it the way the usually do it: charge for copies.

That’s why I think the demand-side change is so important. When academics realize that they’re cutting readers away from their work, they will demand to be published in an open access model.

I heard a presentation this summer from Science Commons about the work they were doing in analyzing and revisualizing a corpus of neuroscience papers, I was deeply impressed; I saw natural language processing technology being used to make the progress science more comprehensible. But most libraries aren’t allowed to let their students do such analysis because of the contracts they sign with publishers. Open Access has the power to do away with these restrictions; as always, it’s not just about getting it free of cost, it’s about freedom.

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“…If it wasn’t for those darn kids”

February 9th, 2007 by Gavin Baker

Hi.

We are not radicals. Sorry Washington Post, you’ve just got us pegged wrong.

Our philosophy is founded in decades of legal scholarship. That’s why people like Larry Lessig support us. We may dramatize the issues to help them connect with students, but we are far from radical.

On the contrary, this demonstrates the breadth of the consensus in favor of public access. From the staid librarians to kooky little us. It is the publishing companies, who want something for nothing, that are the special interest, as Peter Suber points out:

Do supporters of national OA mandates like FRPAA want something for nothing? No. We want something for something. Crawford is forgetting that taxpayers have already paid for the underlying research and that publishers pay nothing to receive the written results. Yes, publishers add value to those results. But if publishers and taxpayers both make a contribution to the value of peer-reviewed articles arising from publicly-funded research, then what’s the best way to split this baby? The FRPAA solution is a reasonable compromise: a period of exclusivity for the publisher followed by free online access for the public. If the AAP wants to block OA mandates per se, rather than just negotiate the embargo period, then it’s saying that it wants no compromise, that the public should get nothing for its investment, and that publishers should control access to research conducted by others, written up by others, and funded by taxpayers. I’d call that getting something for nothing.

All Scooby Doo references aside: First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

UPDATE: Note that this is exactly in line with the strategy the publishers bought from the “pit bull,” i.e. “if the other side is on the defensive, it doesn’t matter if they can discredit your statements.” It is my intent to remain on the offensive and to discredit their statements.

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Announcing the National Day of Action for Open Access: Feb. 15

February 2nd, 2007 by Gavin Baker

I am proud to announce FreeCulture.org’s participation in the National Day of Action for Open Access on Feb. 15.

Together with the Alliance for Taxpayer Access, we are organizing the day to highlight students’ stake in the debate about access to research. We’re encouraging our chapters to take action on their campus to raise awareness at their school.

Read the press release here.

(FreeCulture.org is a member of the Alliance for Taxpayer Access.)

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