In search for the Generation Open | Open Science

"I took part in an interesting Twitter discussion on Open Access and academia in general that was started by Curt Rice’s article ‘Wall Street analysts say open access has failed due to lack of focus, but their analysis might help it succeed.’ This text includes some interesting observations, although it shares the disadvantage of most blog entries – it is too concise and leaves the reader with more questions than answers. Professor Rice (apparently following the analytics from Bernstein Research) noticed that the Open Access movement faces difficulties rooted in its inner contradictions and, what is more interesting for me, inside of academia. He wrote that 'The prestige of some traditional journals is so compelling for career advancement that open access can’t win' and called for changing funding and promotional rules that promote Open Access. At the same time Rice raised another problem '…governments, research councils and universities don’t dare. (About the openness – WK). Understandably so. Researchers would scream, careers would stall out, and professors would take to the streets.' Politics (of states and universities) answers, more or less, to the interests found within society, or in this case, within academia. Research councils, funders and governmental bodies, representing different approaches to the problems of scientific publishing, have various allies (which are more or less overt) among researchers at different careers levels. Some researchers actively defend a status quo, while others just do what is most comfortable for them. To understand this problem we might focus for a moment on another interesting topic mentioned in this discussion by Allisson Stelling and Dave Moore. What does “prestige” mean in terms of academic promotion? Nowadays, in the age of a strict efficiency regime, when business management and accounting enter almost every field of life, prestige means principally the various quantitative measures used in the evaluation of academic effort. All of these measures are at the same time means of power that make researchers evaluated by them more likely to perform some kinds of actions and to forsake others. How do these measures impact open access publishing? You can read more for example here on Gabor Zolyomi’s case and his opinions about this problem. These measures exist because some (usually already tenured, thus unaffected) academics support them and others follow to secure their careers, and no one is really interested in changing them ..."