Gershman calls out academic publishing abuses « TeleRead: News and views on e-books, libraries, publishing and related topics

abernard102@gmail.com 2014-05-09

Summary:

"Fresh fuel has been poured on the smouldering open access/academic publishing debate by Samuel Gershman, a postdoctoral fellow at MIT in Josh Tenenbaum’s Computational Cognitive Science Group, in an online article for the Boston Globe.  Entitling his piece 'The Exploitative Economics of Academic Publishing,' he protests that: 'taxpayers in the United States spend $139 billion a year on scientific research, yet much of this research is inaccessible not only to the public, but also to other scientists. This is the consequence of an exploitative scientific journal system that rewards academic publishers while punishing taxpayers, scientists, and universities.' As you would expect from such a tone, Gershman comes down very much on the open access side of the debate. Not least as he’s been a victim of the notorious Elsevier takedown notices himself. 'Like many scientists, I provide access to my research papers on my website,' he states. 'When I published these papers in Elsevier journals, I was required to hand over the copyrights. Therefore, I had no choice but to remove the papers.' Gershman then proceeds to demolish the value-add arguments used by closed-access publishers to justify their business models ..."

Link:

http://www.teleread.com/publishing/gershman-calls-academic-publishing-abuses/

From feeds:

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

Tags:

oa.new oa.comment oa.elsevier oa.publishers oa.policies oa.copyright oa.licensing oa.takedowns oa.libre

Date tagged:

05/09/2014, 20:39

Date published:

05/09/2014, 16:39