Open Access Rants: Hanging together on the goddam wagon – Confessions of a Science Librarian

"Twitter is a great place to rant and rave sometimes. You can feel free to let loose and say what you’re thinking without necessarily feeling that you need to have completely well-formed ideas. The enforced brevity can sometimes also be a plus, as it forces you to distill what you want to say to the bare minimum. It it possible to string together longer thoughts across multiple tweets but it becomes a bit awkward to read. I let loose a couple of Open Access related rants over the last few days and I thought I’d share them here, slightly cleaned up to make them more readable. Both are fairly short but ended up stretching across 15 or so tweets. The first one was inspired by a recent trend I’ve seen in anti-OA commentary, largely at the Scholarly Kitchen but pretty pervasive ... The second rant is related to the first but is more directed to specific 'OA skeptic' rhetoric that I see that we can’t have OA because it threatens publishing revenue at scholarly societies and small journals and hence their viability ..."