Parallel universes: open access and open source

Posted Feb 24, 2006 20:25 UTC (Fri) by dps (guest, #5725)
Parent article: Parallel universes: open access and open source

While I agree open access is good, and a *lot* of the good material is avialable on axvir (the successor to xxx), just being able to make your own material open access is not worth that much: serious study requires access to other people's work too, which means access to those non-free journals.

Even if you do not need to read other people's work you do need to cite it, and doing that without reading at least some of a paper is dangerous. You *can* find some of it online but this is a a major problem unless the author's name is really unusual. (At least some ACM journals do allow an elecronic copy of your institution's web site, and non-zero impact factors.)

I doubt that things will change much unless and until it the current model becomes impossible, which requires not just open access requirements but also affordable alterantives (i.e. not $1000 per page). Publushing technical papers is hard enough even if you are not required to find funding.