Today’s Guardian has a piece by Graham Taylor, director of academic, educational and professional publishing at the Publishers Association, entitled Attacking publishers will not make open access any more sustainable . It’s such a crock that I felt compelled to respond point-by-point in the comments.
Yesterday, David Willetts, the UK government’s Minister for Universities and Science, gave a speech at the annual general meeting of the Publisher’s Association. The full text of the speech is online and very well worth reading, though it’s long.
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This arrived in my inbox last week, but I’ve been too busy to blog about it until now.
Item 1 : With his new piece at the Guardian, “Persistent myths about open access scientific publishing”, Mike continues to be a thorn in the side of exploitative commercial publishers, who just can’t seem to keep their facts straight.
By one of those happy coincidences that you sometimes get, today saw the publication of not one but two dinosaur ontogeny papers: this morning I was sent a copy of Woodruff and Fowler (2012) on ontogenetic changes in the bifid spines of diplodocoids, and tonight I was alerted to Werning (2012) on Tenontosaurus growth trajectories based on osteohistology. It’s interesting to compare them.
A short one, because I’ve been commenting on other people’s blogs a lot recently ( Scholarly Kitchen , Open and Shut , The Scientist ) and it infuriates me how hard it is get a good back-and-forth discussion going in those venues. The contrast of course is with SV-POW!
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In among all the open-access discussion and ostrich-herding, we at SV-POW! Towers do still try to get some actual science done. As we all know all too well, the unit of scientific communication is the published paper , and getting a submission ready involves a lot more than just the research itself.
A quick note to remind everyone that although the RWA is dead, that only brings us back to the status quo. At present, it’s still the case that the great majority of US government-funded research goes behind paywalls . Although the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has a public access policy that is resulting in a lot of papers being posted for general access at PubMed Central, the NIH is only one of a dozen U.S.