Save Scholarly Ideas, Not the Publishing Industry:
Ironically, of course, it’s the government who is trying to push back against the scholarly publishing’s stranglehold on scholarly knowledge. The Science and Technology Policy Office has a current Request for Information” out (due January 2!) about providing public access to peer-reviewed scholarly publications that result from federally-funded research. They get the hypocrisy of funding research so that corporations can lock it down. Why don’t most scholars? This is, of course, only one part of the puzzle because only a small fraction of what we produce as scholars is funded by federal agencies.
But what I want to know is this:
1.What are *you* doing to resist the corporate stranglehold over scholarly knowledge in order to make your knowledge broadly accessible?
2.What are the five things that you think that other scholars should do to help challenge the status quo?
Oooh
You should see what it’s like in the UK.
The research councils (government funded research bodies) have a 6 month open access mandate unlike the NIH’s 12 month.
This means we are paying for immediate or 6 month deposit in UKPMC rather than getting it free after 12 months. And when one paper published by Elsevier costs $3000 to publish it really adds up.
Open Access is wonderful, but seeing that we are giving our work to these publishers for free, and even doing peer review for free and maybe editorial work, why are we then having to pay for Open Access as well?
Surely they should be paying the public purse back for the right to sell on our work for profit?