Unilever Centre for Molecular Informatics, Cambridge - Open Research Reports: What Jenny and I said (and why I am angry) « petermr's blog

"Jenny Molloy and I have been representing the Open Knowledge Foundation at the Open Science Summit and we presented the Open Research Reports (ORR) project. The slides we used are at http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6280676/orr.pptx. I expect that at some stage we’ll be on the video record (last year’s was very useful and also there was a transcript!). Because what we say affects the understanding of the slides ... We started with the (obvious) truth that information is a key component of health-care. That it’s critical for the poorest countries in the world. So isn’t it already catered for by the HINARI program http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HINARI which 'was set up by the World Health Organization and major publishers to enable developing countries to access collections of biomedical and health literature.' So the publishers make their electronic material freely available (presumably gratis not libre) ... So isn’t this very commendable of the publishers to give their material freely to those most deserving? And when the countries become rich , they can pay. Well, this year Bangladesh became a richer country and the HINARI journals were cut off. There was outrage, reported by the Lancet (itself an Elsevier journal and closed access so presumably the Bangladeshis couldn’t even read the outrage) ... But I think that’s completely wrong. The HINARI program only exists because the publications are CLOSED. It costs nothing to make the journals available. It costs more technically toprevent people reading the literature than to make it available. Libre material gets copied at zero cost. HINARI is nothing more than the crumbs of charity that the kinds used to give out. HINARI perpetuates a morally unacceptable system. The publishers aren’t giving their content free, they are giving OUR content free (or rather restricting access to our content).  Simply, closed access publishers make money by restricting access to information.  That’s been a consistent theme through the discussion ... Now we all agree, I think, that more and better information leads to better medicine, better health-care, better environment. And ... The worse the medicine and healthcare, etc. the more people die.  Nothing controversial so far? But these are the premises of a syllogism, and when followed through you end up with the conclusion:  Closed access means people die ... I don’t think anyone can deny the truth of that conclusion. If a doctor, a patient, a planner, an engineer, cannot read the appropriate literature then they make suboptimal decisions. And that means people die ... So the balance is: If we want a closed access publishing system then we have to accept that the price is people’s lives.  Well, isn’t that how the world just is? Engineering has fatalities, Transport has fatalities, leisure sports have fatalities, so why not scholarly publishing?  Because it’s completely avoidable. The more I write about Openness the more angry I get about the immorality of closed access and walled gardens. And even more angry about the lobbying, the politics that tries to close down open efforts. We heard today (not from me) about how the American Chemical Society had spent money and lobbied to have Pubchem (the repository of Open chemical structure information) shut down. So my language is now less nuanced ..."