Swing and a miss by the AAAS for open access
peter.suber's bookmarks 2014-08-16
Summary:
"The American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest scientific organisation, recently announced their latest journal, the fully open access ‘Science Advances‘. While superficially this seems like a good move for them, digging into the details reveals many inherent flaws with the journal, that at worst portray the AAAS as a money-grabbing organisation and enemies to the real progress of science, and at best naive about the current state of scholarly publishing and the direction that the open access movement is pushing it in.
To that end, an open letter has been sent to senior members of the AAAS, including the Editor-in-Chief, and newly appointed Publisher of Science and strongly open access public figurehead (cough) Kent Anderson (of Scholarly Kitchen fame). It was edited and generally made considerably more punchy and better-worded by an army of crowd-sourced editors – it really was collaborative writing at it’s finest, and amazing to watch in real time! The letter quickly received media attention in The Scientist, as well as a couple of other outlets that I’ve lost the links to. The two major points the letter makes are the charges associated with licensing and additional page lengths, both of which are not evidence-based judgements. All the details are in the letter, including recommendations for progress."