SUMMARY: Lisa Dittrich, Managing Editor, Academic Medicine, seems to imagine that researchers, their institutions and their funders are being "strong-armed" into taking steps to maximize the usage and impact of their research output by OA zealots. It is more likely that for researchers, their institutions and their funders (the tax-paying public), maximizing research usage and impact is a natural end in itself, optimal and inevitable (though grotesquely slow in coming!) in the online era, that it is merely being hastened toward its natural outcome by the OA movement, and that those who imagine otherwise, perhaps because of interests vested in another outcome, are engaging in wishful thinking. Stay tuned.
Lisa Dittrich (
LD), Managing Editor,
Academic Medicine,
wrote:
LD: "I personally think the push to OA has come from a few zealots (Varmus and whatever Nobel Laureates he could strong arm into signing his various decrees)"
Harold Varmus strong-armed his fellow Nobel Laureates to sign his decrees? Did he also strong-arm the 34,000 signatories of the
PLoS Open Letter?
LD: "and librarians upset about 'the serials crisis'"
About 'the serials crisis' or about the serials crisis? Does LD think they are just
crying wolf?
LD: "Most scientists, though, with the possible exception of physicists, have been quite content with the "open access" they already have--namely, the ability to easily get content through their libraries, paid for by their library's budget."
So it is out of contentment with the "open access" they already have that those of the 34,000 researchers who were not strong-armed by Harold signed the PLoS petition?
And is it to be expected that (once the word is out) scientists, their institutions and their funders will be content to know that until they provide open access to them their articles are getting only
half their potential research impact?
LD: "many of the authors I work with... don't even know what the term "open access" means!"
Keep counting, because those numbers are
changing -- and not in the direction of knowing less...
LD: "And they are VERY busy people. So ask them to take one more step after publication--to deposit their research on an NIH database, or even an IR, and most will say 'I'll get to that... sometime'... "
...'unless our employer or funder mandates it, in which case 95% of us will do it, 81% willingly' (Swan & Brown
2004,
2005 research author surveys).
LD: "As with most other causes, it's those whose livelihoods --the Varmuses and Harnads of the world"
Livelihoods? We both have day jobs!
LD: "--and those whose pocketbooks--the librarians and publishers--who are most invested in this issue who get their knickers in a twist over it"
That's to be expected. But librarians and publishers can only knick and twist: it is researchers who provide the content, and they're the only ones who can provide the OA. But their
employers and
funders can help see to it that they do -- just as they see to it that they publish at all ("publish or perish").
LD: "intellectuals w/too much time on their hands."
Does LD mean those "opine-accessors" who just can't resist thinking out loud on OA lists? I agree they're a liability, to both sides, but I'm not sure why they're being singled out as "intellectuals": Intellectual content or rigor is certainly not what the OA movement is going to go down in history for...
LD: "The researchers are busy researching and publishing."
And
counting their citations -- and getting promoted and funded for them. How long does LD think it will take the news to trickle down to the least intellectual of them that they are losing citations as long as they lose would-be users who can't afford the access-tolls?
LD: "One other thing: the assumption that all researchers want to share their data is nuts. Remember the fight over who first discovered the AIDS virus? It got pretty ugly. And we've published research in our journal about geneticists holding their findings pretty close to the vest for fear of being scooped. It's not all a love fest in science land, people."
Has LD ever wondered, then, why scientists publish it at all? or count their citations? Because, you see, OA is about what researchers
publish, not what they hold "close to the vest for fear of being scooped." And have you ever asked yourself, Lisa: if your researchers
didn't want to share their findings (indeed if they weren't mandated by their employers and funders to "publish or perish") what would fill the pages of
Academic Medicine?
Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum
