Open and Shut?: The OA interviews: Philip Cohen, founder of SocArXiv

lterrat's bookmarks 2017-03-13

Summary:

"Fifteen years after the launch of the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) the OA revolution has yet to achieve its objectives. It does not help that legacy publishers are busy appropriating open access, and diluting it in ways that benefit them more than the research community. As things stand we could end up with a half revolution.

But could a new development help recover the situation? More specifically, can the newly reinvigorated preprint movement gain sufficient traction, impetus, and focus to push the revolution the OA movement began in a more desirable direction?

This was the dominant question in my mind after doing the Q&A below with Philip Cohen, founder of the new social sciences preprint server SocArXiv.
 
Preprint servers are by no means a new phenomenon. The highly-successful physics preprint server arXiv (formally referred to as an e-print service) was founded way back in 1991, and today it hosts 1.2 million e-prints in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance and Statistics. Currently around 9,000-10,000 new papers each month are submitted to arXiv.
 
Yet arXiv has tended to complement – rather than compete with – the legacy publishing system, with the vast majority of deposited papers subsequently being published in legacy journals. As such, it has not disrupted the status quo in ways that are necessary if the OA movement is to achieve its objectives – a point that has (somewhat bizarrely) at times beencelebrated by open access advocates.
 
In any case, subsequent attempts to propagate the arXiv model have generally proved elusive. In 2000, for instance, Elsevier launched a chemistry preprint server called ChemWeb, but closed it in 2003. In 2007, Nature launched Nature Precedings, but closed it in 2012."

Link:

http://poynder.blogspot.com/2017/03/the-oa-interviews-philip-cohen-founder.html

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » lterrat's bookmarks

Tags:

oa.repositories oa.versions

Date tagged:

03/13/2017, 20:10

Date published:

03/13/2017, 16:10