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Country: United Kingdom
Organisation: UnitedHealth Chronic Disease Initiative
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Please tell the European Commission what you think
8th Jun 2010
Do you favour open access publishing of scientific papers? The EuropeanCommission would like to know—so please answer the survey at: http://surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=tVtzMMsPl83W2yGQ4lZ1uYPwn1WYLpKuMdv7Lcych44%3d& It takes only a few minutes to answerand is, I judge, a well designed questionnaire.
It may well be that you don’tknow what “open access publishing” means, and it’s most unlikely that youunderstand its full implications. (I write this not because I know anythingabout you as an individual but because I know after years of talking toresearchers that most don’t grasp open access publishing fully.) But openaccess publishing is one of the great battle grounds of science and has thepotential to revolutionise science.
Open access publishing means,firstly, that the scientific studies are available for free to everybodyeverywhere and, secondly, that the studies can be reused without permission butsimply with attribution.
The first argument in favourof open access publishing is that it allows access to science to the manygroups who don’t have good access at the moment—patients, the public, people inlow and middle income countries, and, indeed, many researchers, students, andprofessionals in wealthier countries. In the context of chronic disease thismeans that many people interested in or affected by chronic disease could getaccess to science in a way that they can’t at the moment.
Next, ideas are fundamentallydifferent from, say, apples. As George Bernard Shaw wrote: “If you have anapple and I have an apple and if we exchange these apples then you and I willstill each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and weexchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.” Ideas proliferateto create new ideas, and we kill many potential ideas by keeping current ideasbehind access controls.
Then open access publishingshould mean that the whole world could have access to all science for lessmoney than is currently spent on scientific journals. This is a wonderful dealfor everybody except the publishers of science who have for years been makingmoney out of restricting access to research, most of it publicly funded,without adding any value to the process of publishing science. (I write this asan ex-publisher of scientific journals.)
Anyway, I shouldn’t beinfluencing you. I’d simply like you to contribute to the survey.
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