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Open Access Week Thought of the Day #1

It’s Day 1 of Open Access Week, and here’s a thought from Mike Taylor (of the Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week blog) to kick off the week:

If you can make money by publishing research, that’s great.

The issue is not publishers who make money. The issue is corporations that go by the title “publishers”, but which in fact make money by preventing publication.

Because “publish” means “make public”. The whole point of a publisher is to make things public. The reason the scientists of 30 years ago sent their papers to a publisher was because having a publisher print them on paper and ship them around the world was the most effective way to make them public. And subscriptions were the obvious way to pay for that work. But now that anything can be made public instantly — “Publishing is not a job any more, it’s a button” — giving papers to a “publisher” that locks them behind a [paywall] is the opposite of publishing. It’s privating.

Read more: http://svpow.com/2012/10/16/publish-means-make-public-paywalls-are-the-opposite-of-publishing/

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Take our poster, please!

What are among the stickiest, most strangling tentacles in the world?  That’s right, the tentacles of profiteering journal publishers!  (Why am I saying such nasty things about them?  Well, because they charge huge fees for access to articles that researchers give them for free and other researchers peer review for free.  That’s right, they get articles, copyrights, and labor for free, and then they make a fortune charging the (often nonprofit) institutions that employ those researchers for access to those articles!)

For Brooklyn College’s Faculty Day Conference this week, a few colleagues and I made a poster illustrating just that predatory behavior and introducing open access as an alternative. But we didn’t make the poster for in-house use only!  No, we want to share the files with you.  Change them a little or a lot and use them for your educational campaigns about open access!

(The octopus image is adapted from http://www.flickr.com/photos/luca-beanone-barcellona/4776886666/ (CC-BY-NC))

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Today, not tomorrow: Sign the whitehouse.gov petition in support of open access!

Please consider signing the petition at whitehouse.gov in support of open access to taxpayer-funded research:  http://wh.gov/6TH

This isn’t just another petition about just another topic.  No, this offers the chance to change the conversation.  Why?  Because the White House makes a formal response to any “We the People” petition that reaches 25,000 signatures in 30 days.  (The petition closes on June 19, so there’s still some time, but, even so, don’t delay!)

There is the very slight nuisance of having to create an account on whitehouse.gov (basically, you give them your name and email address), but if you were ever going to put up with some nuisance in order to sign a petition, this just might be the petition to do it for!

Go! Sign! Share broadly! Soon!