Joe D » open access

Journalology: What is the scientific paper?

Joe — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 12:41:55 +0000

A year ago, the discussions at the Science Online conference inspired me to explore the question “what is the scientific paper?” — and specifically, what is wrong with the scientific paper and what its future might be. In time for this year’s conference, I’ve been reposting the the blogs on Journalology:

And perhaps one day there will be more, when I’ve processed the information from this year’s Science Online.

Journalology: Against green open access

Joe — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 13:17:45 +0000

Every time I blog about the future of science publishing and the opportunities for radical changes to the way science is conducted and disseminated, somebody comes along and leaves a comment telling me that the state of science publishing is perfect but one thing: the lack of “green” open access. At Journalology I explain what green open access is, and why it’s a mundane distraction from the real problems and opportunities in science publishing. Read it here.

Journalology: Why you can’t copy abstracts into Wikipedia

Joe — Thu, 13 May 2010 16:13:11 +0000

I am not a lawyer, but I do have six years experience of Wikipedia, was once a very prolific Wikipedian, and, despite my lack of activity there in more recent years, am apparently still an “admin” on the English language Wikipedia. This, coupled with working for an open-access publisher, means that I have also picked up a little knowledge of (mostly US & UK) copyright over the years. Since I can’t boil all that down to just 250 characters (or whatever the limit is), this post serves to answer this question, raised at FriendFeed: ‘Does an article in pubmed belong to the “legal public domain”, can I copy and paste it in wikipedia?’

Continue reading at Journalology.

On the open-access “citation advantage”

Joe — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 15:59:30 +0000

This is an archival repost of something I wrote on the old blog in october 2008.

This week, I am mostly clearing my Google Docs of old half-written blog posts which I never got around to publishing…

From the discussions in the publishing/OA blogosphere, one would get the impression that the “citation advantage” gained by open-access publishing is an important issue. Peter Suber collects links to recent items on the question of whether open-access papers are cited more often than equivalent closed-access articles here. There evidence so far is mixed: some studies show the effect, some do not.

So what? Sorry, that may sound flippant, and all to easy for somebody who has no need to gratify grant agencies or tenure comities to say. But I have yet to find anybody in either publishing or academia who finds journal citation rates a satisfactory metric for anything at all, and I’m not convinced that it is of any use in this case either. Are we advocates of open access because we want more citations flying back and forth? Pffft. Open access is about doing cool things (reading, mining, building, using) with information that rightfully belongs to humanity. No “advantage” shown for single outdated measure of “use”? Who cares?