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The commentary sometimes outstrips the story

By Georgia Harper

Open Access business models are numerous. There's no magic path to OA. But some high-profile efforts have been around long enough to warrant analysis. So Declan Butler writes an article about PLoS (Public Library of Science), which he calls the "poster child for open-access, that appears in Nature News, ironically not open to anyone who does not have a subscription: Access : PLoS stays afloat with bulk publishing : Nature News. BUT, the comments are open access and they tell a fairly interesting story of their own! It does seem rather odd that Nature would close off the story and leave the comments open, so that those outside the very limited number of people in the world who have a subscription only see one side of the story. In this case, the comments are almost uniformly critical of the article, calling it an attempt to smear a competitor, without the disclaimers of conflict of interest one would expect from a journal associated with scientific publishing (and its attempt to at least seem to be objective). Well, I will leave it to all of you to figure out if you have sufficient "rights" to read the article itself, but do go read the comments. Too bad about whatever data supports the whole conversation. We pobrecitos don't have access to that, just to the rants about the results. Ah, transitions. Of course, I could spend some of my very limited time today clicking my way through the variety of screens I must click through to get to my library's walled garden where I suspect this article is cached away. Maybe it's worth it. Maybe not. Today it's not. It's summer, I'm on vacation. Only minimally attentive to tedious things like journal article search interfaces. And why is it that publishers do this to libraries? Oh, yes, I'm so sure they have their very good reasons. And I have mine for ignoring authors and their writings whose publishers make their work hard to find and read. So much to read, watch, listen to. So little time. There's the basic fundamental of Open Access. The business models will follow.

Full post as published by ©ollectanea on July 08, 2008 (boomark / email).