del-fi • Officially Entering "And Then They Fight" Phase of Open Access

abernard102@gmail.com 2013-05-20

Summary:

"'And, my friends, in this story you have a history of this entire movement. First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you.'   Although the substance of the above quote is usually attributed to Gandhi, there’s no record that he actually said it. The quote above is by Nicholas Klein, a labor activist, from 1918. I don’t include it as an example of attribution decay. I use it as a frame for where we are in the open access world right now. We’ve had a good run. We got the NIH public access mandate. We got the petition to 25,000 signatures. We got the presidential directive extending the NIH policy across the entire federal government. We got multiple examples of open access publishers into sustainable revenue models. But changing the default from closed to open was always going to involve a phase where those whose revenue models depend on closed really brought the guns out against us. And we’re there now. There’s Wiley, wallowing in the mud and smearing Public Library of Science’s peer review credentials under the charade of a survey of authors. There’s Elsevier, proposing a novel license for STM publishers and somehow magically being part of a Netaction 'bad legislation' coalition that attacks all open access bills, while denying any knowledge of it (no story coverage, but some conversations on Alicia Wise’s twitter feed). There’s crocodile tears covering the emergence of scammy open access journals, none of which mentions the long-time existence of scammy closed access journals. This is not surprising, as so many of the large, 'authoritative and important' publishers make money by publishing scammy journals - anyone remember the Merck-Elsevier scammy bone journal? Still waiting to see someone mention that in the same breath. Then there’s the systemic disadvantage we have as advocates once policies move into implementation phase. The meetings last week at the National Academies are a great example of why it’s so hard to change the system. I had to travel 3 of the 4 days for work, and the fourth day I was in meetings all day that made it impossible for me to attend, or to speak. We have day jobs, us advocates. But the publishing industry we’re fighting against has no other job. They can hire people who have only the responsibility of making sure the open policies are implemented in the least open way. They can saturate every meeting in DC with hired guns, and claim it as evidence that the public supports them. But it’s not about being depressed, or complaining. It’s a sign that we’re finally getting close to the bone. We’re enough of a threat not to be ignored, or ridiculed. We’re gonna get hit, and we’re gonna get hit hard. We have to keep reminding the world that this isn’t about protecting a dinosaur business model, this fight. It’s not about scammy journals, which exist no matter how they get paid for. It’s not about who has the most lobbying money in DC. It’s not about new licenses, or sleazy survey language. It’s about letting entrepreneurs build businesses on top of open content. It’s about kids building cancer tests on open content. It’s about you and me being able to read what our tax dollars paid for. Don’t let the FUD and mudslinging get in the way of that message, ever. We have to keep getting up. We have to keep fighting back. Because in the end, we’re on the right side of history. And once we get through this phase we get to the good part, where they build a monument to Heather Joseph and Peter Suber and Mike Eisen and all the heroes of open access."

Link:

http://del-fi.org/post/50918775743/officially-entering-and-then-they-fight-phase-of-open

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.comment oa.advocacy

Date tagged:

05/20/2013, 15:54

Date published:

05/20/2013, 11:54