Public access and protectionism - Scholarly Communications @ Duke

"By now many folks have commented on the announcement from Nature Publishing Group early this week about public access to all of its content and most have sussed out the fairly obvious fact that this is not open access, in spite of the rah-rah headline in the Chronicle of Higher Education, nor even public access as it is defined by many national or funder mandates.  Just to review quickly the major points about why this announcement actually gives the scholarly community so much less than is implied by either of those terms, consider these limitations: A putative reader can only get to an article if they are sent a link by a subscriber, or the link is present in a news article written by one of the 100 news organizations that NPG has chosen to 'honor.' Articles can only be read inside NPG’s proprietary reader No printing or downloading is possible, so a non-subscriber hoping to use one of these articles to further her own research better have a darn good memory! No machine processing will be possible; no text or data mining. In short, all of the inconveniences of print journals are preserved; what NPG is facilitating here is essentially a replica of loaning a colleague your copy of the printed magazine.  Or, at best, the old-fashioned system whereby authors were given paper 'off-prints' to send to colleagues.  Although, honestly, off-prints had more utility for furthering research than this 'now you see it, now you don’t' system has. If this is not open or public access, what is it?  I like the term 'beggar access,' which Ross Mounce applied to NPG’s scheme in a recent blog post, since it makes clear that any potential reader must ask for and receive the link from a subscriber.  Some suggest that this is a small step forward, but I am not convinced ..."