Open Access is not a Panacea, even if it’s Radical | Hacker News Reader

Open Access is not a Panacea, even if it’s Radical

papers.ssrn.com

Panacea or not, open access should be table stakes for the entire academic publishing system. Especially for the result of work that's funded with public money.

Open access isn't a panacea, it's a baseline. The more cool stuff you can build on top of it, the better. Open access brings the opportunity for everyone to take a shot at annotating, organizing, and filtering knowledge.

I'm sensing some sort of agenda here possibly? Also the irony of only showing the abstract made me laugh a little.

This is SSRN - arXiv for social sciences. You can download the full text of the paper if you click.

The paper, I think, makes a more interesting claim than you give it credit for: those areas that can afford scholarly work tend to make use of free resources the most. Based on this work, it is possible that open access alone is not enough to give poorer universities, etc. the access to scholarly work.

It's not clear what "agenda" you think the paper has. It seems like an interesting piece of work.

> those areas that can afford scholarly work tend to make use of/ABUSE free resources the most ??

oohhh, this is ringing some bells right now

How is it abuse? These resources have no marginal cost to produce and their creators generally want as much use as possible (think pre-prints, open access course material, ...). However, less well researched individuals (commonly found in poorer areas) are simply not aware of these resources.

If a data scientist at Google uses R instead of SAS (or some other proprietary statistical computing language) while a data scientist at a non-profit is forced to use SAS because of organizational constraints there is no abuse.

> Based on this work, it is possible that open access alone is not enough to give poorer universities, etc. the access to scholarly work.

I’d say it does give them the access, by definition. But it doesn’t ensure that they use that access of course.

It’s the good old equality of opportunity or equality of result debate, right?

It always struck me as odd this three-sided arrangement where academics give away their copyright to journal publishers and their employers turn around and license the journals in bulk. Who thought this was a good idea to begin with? I see no easy way to unwind this mess now.

Knowledge should be free.

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