Tomorrow is a very important day for OPEN – the Open Access Button initiative (https://www.openaccessbutton.org ) is holding an afternoon get-together in London.
The OAButton is driven by undergraduates – initially in Medicine – who are frustrated and now ANGRY about publishers’ paywalls. It’s immoral that medical information should only be available to <0.1% of the world. And – to be quite clear – there are only two things driving paywalls:
- publishers’ greed
- academics’ lock-in to the quest for personal glory
OAButton is initially raw anger – this is unacceptable and must be changed. Simply tell the the world. It’s a Digital Century demonstration – a freedom march. My generation marched to Aldermaston, Greenham Common and Molesworth to protest against the injustice or nuclear weapons; OAButton is similarly digitally marching against publishers’s paywalls.
Protests often start off slow and are ridiculed. You may be tempted to write off the OAButton as a few undergraduates making a protest that no-one will take seriously. You would be very foolish. Protest can grow rapidly into mass action. The driving force is injustice, because:
CLOSED ACCESS MEANS PEOPLE DIE
And the publishing industry has now very few friends except their shareholders and those entertained by their lobbyists. They’re aren’t now selling any useful service – the academics do the writing, the review. The publishers technical ability is AWFUL – they make things worse.
So the publishers are selling two things:
- branded glory for academics and universities
- fear: through their lawyers
Anything else can be created and delivered without publishers. So publishing is broken and could collapse and any time. It relies totally on academic glory. It points backwards.
And the OAButton points forward. The future belongs to undergraduates, and I’m backing them. I don’t know where they are going, but I hope they throw off compromise, fudge, bureaucracy, mumble.
I’m going to London tomorrow. I shall listen. It’s possible that our own effort to create a bibliography of scientific data may be useful. If you’re young at heart, idealistic, motivated and courageous get involved!
Well said! One of your best posts on the topic. Succinct and precise. The greed factor is without question and easily quantifiable, as you’ve done in the past. Thus, a good attacking angle. About the glory factor:
“Anything else can be created and delivered without publishers”
Can not glory be created and delivered without publishers as well? No matter the personal feelings about such things, getting powerful human motives to work in one’s favour would help nicely in speeding up the transition. Has the OA-community discussed this?
“It relies totally on academic glory.”
You have identified the source, why not attempt to tap it, instead of trying to quell it?
>>Can not glory be created and delivered without publishers as well?
Branding is very powerful and irrational. People drink mineral water because it has magic powers. People think Nature and Science have magic powers.
>>No matter the personal feelings about such things, getting powerful human motives to work in one’s favour would help nicely in speeding up the transition. Has the OA-community discussed this?
Yes but we don’t yet have magic powers
“It relies totally on academic glory.”
>>You have identified the source, why not attempt to tap it, instead of trying to quell it?
If we knew how…
“Magic powers” — this almost had me choke on my morning tea, but I think you wanted to be rather short and summarily than fatalistic. Thanks.