<nettime> Opening up worlds of knowledge

["Frederick Noronha (FN)" <fred@bytesforall.org>]

Opening up worlds of knowledge  (FN) http://www.tacticaltech.org/node/251

19/02/2005 - 04:29

Over breakfast (or was it lunch?), we exchanged links and subversive ideas. Oh, 
what a world that would be, if only knowledge was really free!

Jean-Claude Guedon of thbe Universite' de Montre'al is probably better 
introduced by a paper he wrote. "Just search for me and 'Oldenburg'," he said. 
It did pop up in a trice, at http://www.arl.org/arl/proceedings/138/guedon.html 
This is a text about "librarians, research scientists, publishers, and the 
control of scientific publishing".

Guedon is passionate about open publishing. It echoes in what he writes: "In 
the last 50 years, publishers have managed to transform scholarly journals --- 
traditionally, a secondary, unpromising publishing venture at best --- into big 
business. How they have managed to create extremely high profit rates is a 
story that has not yet been clearly told. What is the real basis behind this 
astounding capability? What is the source of their power? How can it be 
subverted?"

Below are just a few more lines of the ideas of Guedon, from his article "The 
'Green' and 'Gold' Roads to Open Access: The Case for Mixing and Matching" in 
Serials Review 30(4) 2004, as represented by a critic of his perspective, 
Stevan Harnad:

"Open Access (OA) means: free online access to all peer-reviewed journal 
articles. Jean-Claude Gue'don argues against the efficacy of author 
self-archiving of peer-reviewed journal articles (the "Green" road to OA). He 
suggests instead that we should convert to Open Access Publishing (the "Golden" 
road to OA) by "mixing and matching" Green and Gold as follows:

"First, self-archive dissertations (not published, peer-reviewed journal 
articles). Second, identify and tag how those dissertations have been evaluated 
and reviewed. Third, self-archive unrefereed preprints (not published, 
peer-reviewed journal articles). Fourth, develop new mechanisms for evaluating 
and reviewing those unrefereed preprints, at multiple levels. The result will 
be OA Publishing (Gold)."

There are a whole lot of useful links on this page about open access -- 
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10504/ -- though I am having some difficulty in 
locating Guedon's original article via Google.com.

Guedon (61) narrated his early experiments with a comparative literature 
journal, his involvement with the Open Society Institute -- 
http://www.osi.hu/infoprogram/ -- the Budapest Open Access --Initiative. 
http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml -- and more

As we munched through our typically South India spicy (not for me!) veg food, 
Dr Guedon spoke about the ironies of publicly funded research being largely 
locked, away from the access of the public. All in the greater cause of 
unjustifiable levels of profits!

In his view, the Public Library of Science -- http://plos.org/ -- was among the 
most successful in touching its goals. Then there was BioMed Central, with 
hundreds of open access journals, and the Directory of Open Access Journals, or 
DOAJ at Lund (Sweden). there's also Peter Suber's Blog. URLs are, respectively, 
http://www.opendoar.org/ and http://www.biomedcentral.com/ and 
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html

There's a new world out there, with loads of content waiting for you. It's a 
debate most of us might not even be aware of. Time to take a look...
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Frederick Noronha (FN)                    Nr Convent Saligao 403511 GoaIndia
Freelance Journalist                      P: 832-2409490 M: 9822122436
http://fn.swiki.net                       http://fn-floss.notlong.com
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Where the needs of the world and your talents cross, there lies your
vocation. --Aristotle


#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net